Paniniyavyakaranodaharanakosah La grammaire panineenne par ses exemples; Paninian Grammar through Its Examples.

• Author: Scharf, Peter M.
• Position: Book review

Paniniyavyakaranodaharanakosah; La grammaire panineenne par ses exemples; Paninian Grammar through Its Examples. Vol. I: Udaharanasamaharah; Le livre des exemples: 40 000 entrees pour un texte; The Book of Examples: 40,000 Entries for a Text. By F. GRIMAL, V. VENKATARAJA SARMA, V. SRIVATSANKACHARYA, and S. LAKSHMINARASIMHAM. Rashtriya Sanskrit Vidyapeetha Series, no. 121; Collection indologie, vol. 93.1. Tirupati: RASHTRIYA SANSKRIT VIDYAPEETHA; Pondicherry: ECOLE FRANCAISE D'EXTREME-ORIENT; INSTITUTE FRANCAISE DE PONDICHERY, 2006. Pp. xi + 1022. Vol. II: Samasaprakaranam; Le livre des mots composes: The Book of Compound Words. By E GRIMAL, V. VENKATARAJA SARMA, and S. LAKSHMINARASIMHAM. Rashtriya Sanskrit Vidyapeetha Series, no. 150; Collection indologie, vol. 93.2. Tirupati: RASHTRIYA SANSKRIT VIDYAPEETHA; Pondicherry: ECOLE FRANCAISF. D'EXTREME-ORIENT; INSTITUTE FRANCAISE DE PONDICHERY, 2007. Pp. xviii + 834. Rs. 600.

Sanskrit is the primary culture-bearing language of India, with a continuous production of literature in all fields of human endeavor over the course of four millennia. Extant works in Sanskrit constitute the largest cultural heritage that any civilization has produced prior to the invention of the printing press. While the Sanskrit language is of preeminent importance to the intellectual and cultural heritage of India, the importance of the intellectual and cultural heritage of India to the rest of the world during the past few millennia and in the present era can hardly be overestimated. It has been a major factor in the development of the world's religions, languages, literature, arts, sciences, and history. The Sanskrit language itself and its highly developed linguistic traditions have played an important role at every stage of the development of modern linguistics, and the indigenous Indian linguistic traditions contain richness of thought yet to be fully appreciated.

Despite the importance of Sanskrit as one of the world's richest knowledge-bearing and culture-bearing languages and as a linguistic object, lexical reference works for Sanskrit lag far behind those available for other major languages; and despite the richness of the Indian linguistic traditions, resources that facilitate access to the intricacies of ancient Indian linguistic analysis remain few. Paninian Grammar through Its Examples provides a very rich contribution to the lexical sources that grant access to the sophisticated linguistic analysis undertaken by the Indian grammatical tradition. It complements works that treat the comprehensive organization of Panini's system, such as Cardona's (1988) Panini: His Work and Its Traditions, vol. 1: Background and Introduction; R. N. Sharma's (1987) The Astadhyayi of Panini, vol. 1: Introduction to the Astadhyayi as a Grammatical Device; and P. Filliozat's (1988) Grammaire sanscrite panineene; and works that provide a translation of, and commentary on, Paninian texts, such as the works of Joshi and Roodbergen, and the subsequent volumes of Sharma's (1990-2001) The Astadhyayi of Panini. The second volume of the work under review, The Book of Compound Words, complements treatments of Panini's composition rules, such as (to mention just a few devoted solely to the topic) K. M. Tiwari's (1984) Panini's Description of Nominal Compounds, Narayana Murti's (1973) Sanskrit Compounds: A Philosophical Study, and Staal's (1966) "Room at the Top in Sanskrit: Ancient and Modern Descriptions of Nominal Composition" (Indo-Iranian Journal 9: 165-98).

As noted above, the lexical resources for Sanskrit are relatively few and are also, for the most part, outdated. In contrast to the periodic revision of the major Greek lexicon, Bohtlingk and Roth's (1855-75) great seven-volume Sanskrit-Worterbuch, the most thorough Sanskrit lexicon ever completed, was updated over a hundred years ago by Bohtlingk in his (1879-89) Sansktit-Worterbuch in kurzerer Fassung and was last provided with supplements by Richard Schmidt in his Nachirdge zum Sanskrit-Worterbuch in kurzerer Fassung von Otto Bohtlingk in 1928. Monier-Williams' (1872) A Sanskrit-English Dictionary, the most complete English-language dictionary of Sanskrit, which is based upon Bohtlingk and Roth's work, was last revised by the author with the assistance of Cappeller and...