A Concordance of Vedic Compounds Interpreted by Veda: Volume 1 (An Old and Rare Book)

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Compound-formation or samasa is a phenomenon which forms a distinguishing feature of one of the oldest languages, viz. Sanskrit. The roots of this phenomenon are easily traced back to the Vedic Sanskrit which is the only extant oldest literature available to the world in the known history of man. The only difference in the formation of compounds in the two stages of Sanskrit, viz. the Vedic and the classical, is that while the compounds in the Vedas are short, pithy phrases spontaneously coming out in the process of communication, those in the classical stage of Sanskrit mostly cease to be short, natural and spontaneous, and sometimes, as in Banabhatta's Kadambari and Dandin's Dasakumaracarita, assume preposterously monstrous length covering pages. In such circumstances, the students of language have to consider this phenomenon of compound-formation in Sanskrit seriously. Naturally, every student of language has found it difficult to avoid the temptation of discussing this topic. Different linguists and grammarians have approached the subject from different points of view and have offered their own explanations and description of compound-formation. But Panini, the ancient Indian grammarian, excels them all, both in the exhaustive treatment and descriptive technique. So many grammarians and linguists have touched the topic of compounds that it is impossible to make a general and exhaustive survey of such works. A complete list of Indian grammarians from post-Paninian period to the eighteenth century is prepared by scholars like KESHAV RAM BHAPTA, R. SHARMA, YUDHISTHIRA MIMAMSAKA¹, etc. But there is one common feature of all these works on compounds, viz. almost everything that has been written from time to time cannot but touch upon the compound-formations in Sanskrit, especially their treatment in Papini's grammar. Even the western scholars are also no exception to this. Not only this, but whenever a compound word-formation occurs in any non- Sanskrit languages, both Indian and foreign, all the writers have attempted to refer to the corresponding data from the ancient Indian grammar of Panini. The scope of the present preface is not to discuss the merits and/or demerits of all these works here, because they contain strange statements and hypotheses about the essence of word-formations and their origin. The scope, therefore, is restricted to offer a brief survey of relevent and comparatively modern works on the topic of compound word-formation, especially by the prominent western writers.

The first and foremost to deserve our attention is the work of TH, BENFEY. He follows the method of Indian grammatical tradition, but introduces new European terms for compoundwords, such as copulative (for dvandra), determinative (for tatpurusa, karmadharaya and dvigu), relative (for bahuvrlhi) and inflexible (for avyayibhava and the repeated formations called amredita'). BENFEY opines that any syntactical composition can be transformed into a compound word. This then amounts to the theory of the origin of compound words from even subordinate sentences.

While BENFEY followed Papini, BOPP sided the grammarian Vopadeva or Bopadeva in his classification of compounds. What BOPP did was that he set up six categories or types of Sanskrit compounds-copulative composite (dvandva), possessive (bahuvrihi), determinative (karmadharaya), dependent composita (tatpurusa), collectiv composita (= dvigu) and adverbial composita (avyayibhava). Being himself a scholar of comparative grammar, Bopp devoted his attention to the semantic side of compound words with their counter-parts in parts of speech. His studies played an important part in introducing Sanskrit language in the field of comparative grammar and also, especially in works devoted to a study or research in ancient Indian languages. His designations of compoundclesses giving their European equivalents were either adopted by or serve as the model for researchers like MAX MULLER who divided the Sanskrit compounds on the basis of parts of speech as substantival, adjectival and adverbial. Relation between the com- ponent members of compounds appeared to be of great significance to him; nouns with its six cases played an important role in compounds according to him; the examination of the Bahuvrihi in the context of parts of speech, therefore, appeared to be a new or strange thing to MAX MULLER.

This monograph of Dr. M. D. Pandit forms the tenth item in Class B of the C. A. S. S. Publication. It is a pleasure for me to present in this Silver Jubilee Year of the C.A. S. S. this volume to the world of scholars working in the field of Veda. The Centre was established as a pioneer national centre for higher training and research in the field of Veda and Vyakarana initially in 1964 by the U. G. C.

Compounding is a natural linguistic phenomenon. Compounds can be treated as abridgement of phrases. They have sentential underlying structure. They are expected to carry and convey the same meaning as those of their underlying phrases. But this process of abridgement opens a door for ambiguity, especially in a language which is not in common use, more so when a language happens to be highly inflected like Sanskrit. For example, the compound rajapurusah may have any of the following underlying phrases:

(a) rajnah purusah,

(b) rajnoh purusah,

(c) rajnam purusah,

(d) raja casau purusas ca,

(e) raja puruso yasya sah (desah).

Although any of these five phrases can stand as the meaning of the compound rajapurusah, all the five are not intended to be conveyed simultaneously by the speaker. The speaker may intend any one of these five and his intention can be known immediately if he is present before the reader. But if he is not present, it becomes very difficult to know his intention. In such cases we take recoure to the context etc. in order to arrive at the intention of the speaker. If the text under analysis is such that there is mention of a compound in some place and there is the mention of its underlying phrase structure at some other place in the same text, I think, such phrasestructure has to be treated as the only intended meaning of the writer of that text.

Dr. M. D. Pandit, the author of this monograph, has aptly adopted this principle for the interpretation of the Vedic compounds and I think he is more than justified in basing his approach on this principle.

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