Guest guest Posted May 26, 2001 Report Share Posted May 26, 2001 INDOLOGY, phillip.ernest@u... wrote: >Wasn't it the 'case' that the science of classical European grammar >was, compared to that of the Indian grammatical tradition, >extrememly crude and primitive; but that European philologists >quickly learned the lessons of the Indian grammarians, and >incorporated what they learned into an impressive and brilliant new >modern science of grammar which may even have some things to add to >the great pioneering work of ancient Indian grammarians? The subject of grammar, even that of Vedic sanskrit (leave alone European languages), however advanced or modern, will never be complete without the ritual. Is there any work done on this topic? Even a compilation of ritual statements giving links between ritual and language/grammar will help. E.g., how asurAs are defeated when gods give masculine forms of numbers 1, 2, 3, 4 5 and ask the asurAs to give feminine forms. eka is masculine and ekam is feminine, and so on but paJca is only masculine, so asurAs are defeated. Ofcourse now it is the ritual which was termed as crude and primitive. The fact of the life is, whatever is advanced rests on what is primitive and never ever outgrows it. The first born thoughts are necessarily fragments of the complete expressions that appear much later (after many micro seconds). We can only deal with the latter comfortably and deny the former "Oh why bother". Best regards Bhadraiah Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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