Epistemology-PramANa Shastra and SphotavAda

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Reference-vpcnk on FRI July 13, Indiancivilization

There are references in this article about Epistemology, "PramANa

ShAstra", Patanjali and SphotavAda of Indian grammatical philosophy. I do

not know the name of the author of this posting. Here are my

observations. Until this day I did not understand the meaning of the

doctrine of "SphotavAda". I will greatly appreciate the input on this

subject from the scholars. This is what I understood. One school says

Sanskrit is like any other convetional language where meanings of

Sanskrit words are just conentional. Other school (Adya Shankaracharya is

here, he opposes SphotavAda) says there is something intrinsic to

Sanskrit but they never explained what it was. The only possibility of

any intrinsic nature of Sanskrit, in my opinion (I may be wrong) could be

due to the fixed atomic meanings to the individual VarNas (VarNavAda) of

Sanskrit and the meaning of the word is sum of meanings of VarNas making

that word. The most cited example in opposition to such intrinsic

arrangement is that of three Sanskrit word "YUpa, RUpa and KUpa". To the

best of my knowledge this discussion has history of at leat of 2000 years

with no tangible outcome. If other scholars see all these discussions in

different light, please kindly improve me in my understanding. I believe

Sanskrit Upasargas have fixed meanings and they could help us to decode

the atomic meanings of individual VarNas. Is there any theoretical

opposition to such scheme other than the modern linguistics's position

that phonemes serve puropse of differentiation and they had no role in

semantics. I believe this may not be true for Sanskrit words. If it is

true , then what is the purpose of discussion of 2000 years on this

subject in Indian linguistic philosophy? My interest is to use this

intrinsic information to generate new Sanskrit technical terminology and

decipher the existing Sanskrit terminology from the ancient technical

books.Here are some interesting Sanskrit words. Sanketana-encoding.

Viketana-decoding. Niketana-address. What is the Sanskrit word for

simulation? Thanks. N.R.Joshi.

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