announcement: proceedings of symposium PLUS summaries in skt

[Jan Houben]

The refereed proceedings of the Third International Symposium on Sanskrit
Computational Linguistics (Hyderabad, 15-17 January 2009) are available (in
fact they have been available from the first day of the symposium onwards):
http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/~ley/db/journals/lncs5400-5499.html
The organisers of this symposium have set a new standard for international
sanskrit conferences and for intercultural linguistics by providing, in
addition, in a separate publication (41 pages) entitled Ga.nakapaa.niniiyam,
the sanskrit abstracts of the papers in these proceedings [plus an extra
brief paper (in English) on the Sanskrit Grammar Machine by Gunderao
Harakare (1887-1979)], which is published by the Sanskrit Academy, Osmania,
2009 (http://www.osmania.ac.in/sanskritacademy/Research/Publication.html; I
did not see publications after 2004 in the list).
The sanskrit translation of abstracts, by Dr. Srinivas Varakhedi and his
team, is an achievement in itself as it is one of very few attempts to deal
IN SANSKRIT with modern linguistic concepts (another more
elaborate attempt I am aware of is G.B. Palsule's work on Indo-European
linguistics written in Sanskrit, entitled Yubhaata.h sa.msk.rtam prati).

A few examples from Ga.nakapaa.niniiyam (2009):
morphology (in one sense) becomes: prak.rti-pratyaya-vivecanam;
(n.b. "morphology" is neither in MW's English Skt nor in Apte's English Skt)
word formation: pada-ni.spatti.h;
syntax: vaakya-sa.mracanaa, with explanation (needed because of modern
syntacticians' work is often mainly based on languages with largely fixed
word order:) vaakye pada-krama-niyama.h;
derivational word-generating device (as characterisation of
A.s.taadhyaayii):
dhaatu-praatipadika-pratyaya-yojanena pada-ni.spaadaka.m yantram;
"Questions of linguistic development, of historic sound change ... lie
outside Paa.nini's interest" (from S.D. Joshi's contribution):
bhaa.sotpatti-vi.sayinii jijñaasaa, bhaa.saayaa.m
var.na-parivartana-krama-vi.sayako vicaara.h ... paa.nine.h vicaara-paridhau
naantarbhavanti
S.D. Joshi, in his Keynote Address "Background of the A.s.taadhyaayii",
writes:
"Is the A.s.taadhyaayii rightly called a grammar?"
The spirit of this question will obviously be missed if 'grammar' would be
translated as vyaakara.na.
Varakhedi et al.'s solution:
kim a.s.taadhyaayyaa.h 'graamar' (bhaa.saa-niyama-sa:ngraha.h) iti naama
samucitam?
S.D. Joshi: "grammar developed in Greece and Rome is paradigmatic,
"rom-grii;s (sic) de;sayo.h vyaakara.na.m aadar;sa-ruupaadhaarita.m
dariid.r;syate":

Jan Houben