[INDOLOGY] asti as copula

[jason.cannon-silber at studium.uni-hamburg.de]

Dear members of the Indology listserv,

I have recently been wondering about the nature of the copula in  
Sanskrit grammar (both in theory and in practice), and specifically  
whether and how often the form /asti/ is used as a copula in Classical  
Sanskrit. I am sorry if this subject has been raised before on this  
list, but from my search of the archives it seems it has not been  
addressed directly.

Any user of Sanskrit will know that there need be no word meaning "to  
be" (i.e., no copula) in a sentence expressing that "X is Y" (i.e., a  
nominal sentence). But from the exchange between Profs. Deshpande and  
Bronkhorst in the pages of /Annals BORI/, I gather that at least  
some /vaiyākaraṇa/s understood there to be a "silent,"  
copulative /asti/ in such nominal sentences as /Devadattaḥ pācaka  
odanasya/ or even /Rāmo gataḥ/. (Whether Pāṇini himself was likely to  
have had such an understanding was there the /vivādāspada/.)

On the other hand, I have been told by someone whose knowledge of  
Sanskrit usage I hold in high esteem that authors of classical  
Sanskrit almost never use /asti/ in this way, and that such usage  
might even be considered wrong. This same person has suggested to me  
that (part of) the reason for this may lie in the fact that technical  
terms derived from the form /asti/ (please bear in mind that I am  
speaking here only of the form /asti/, not of forms of the root /as-/  
in other tenses, persons, or numbers), such as /āstika/ or /astitva/,  
are invariably connected with /asti/'s existential (or perhaps  
"adessive") meaning. I have noted that Speijer seems aware of no such  
avoidance, and gives a couple examples of what he understands to be  
copulative /asti/ from the story literature (/Sanskrit Syntax/ §§2-3).

I would therefore like to know if there is any literature discussing  
this avoidance (or perhaps even proscription) of using /asti/ as  
copula. A pre-modern discussion would be especially interesting, but I  
would also appreciate further secondary resources, or even your own  
thoughts.

With best wishes,
Jason Cannon-Silber
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