--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Bhairitu <noozg...@...> wrote: <snip> > What else would Sanskrit scholars be looking at if > it wasn't spiritual texts, Turq? That seems to be > the only stuff that survived.
Not according to Briggs: "Besides works of literary value, there was a long philosophical and grammatical tradition that has continued to exist with undiminished vigor until the present century. Among the accomplishments of the grammarians can be reckoned a method for paraphrasing Sanskrit in a manner that is identical not only in essence but in form with current work in Artificial Intelligence." And: "The author [of a grammatical analysis quoted by Briggs], Nagesha, is one of a group of three or four prominent theoreticians who stand at the end of a long tradition of investigation. Its beginnings date to the middle of the first millennium B.C. when the morphology and phonological structure of the language, as well as the framework for its syntactic description were codified by Panini. "His successors elucidated the brief, algebraic formulations that he had used as grammatical rules and where possible tried to improve upon them. A great deal of fervent grammatical research took place between the fourth century B.C and the fourth century A.D. and culminated in the seminal work, the Vaiakyapadiya by Bhartrhari. "Little was done subsequently to advance the study of syntax, until the so-called 'New Grammarian' school appeared in the early part of the sixteenth century with the publication of Bhattoji Dikshita's Vaiyakarana-bhusanasara and its commentary by his relative Kaundabhatta, who worked from Benares. Nagesha (1730-1810) was responsible for a major work, the Vaiyakaranasiddhantamanjusa, or Treasury of definitive statements of grammarians, which was condensed later into the earlier described work. These books have not yet been translated."
