The grammatical compendium of which this is a translation is current among the pandits of the North-west provinces, and of most of the other provinces of India. The translation is one of a, series of attempts to encourage and facilitate the interchange of ideas between the pandits and the senior English students of the Government Colleges. How different the arrangement of a Sanskrit treatise on Grammar is from that of an English treatise on the subject, may be inferred from the facts stated in the subjoined extract from the preface to the Hindi version of the same compendium.
The groundwork of the grammatical literature of the Sanskrit is comprised in Panini eight Lectures, entitled "The Astadhyayi". Each of the lectures is divided into four sections, and each section into a number of sūtra, or succinct aphorisms. On these Mr. Colebrooke remarks:- "The studied brevity of the Paniniya sutras renders them in the highest degree obscure; even with the knowledge of the key to their interpretation, the student find them ambiguous. In the application of them when under stood, he discovers many seeming contradictions; and with every exertion of practise memory, he must experience the utmost difficulty in combining rules dispersed n apparent confusion through different portions of s Panini's eight Lectures."
The same accomplished scholar adds: The outline of Panini's "arrangement is simple; but numerous exceptions, and frequent digressions, have involved it in much seeming confusion. The first two lectures (the first section especially, which is in a manner the key of the whole grammar) contain definitions; in the three next are collected affixes, by which verbs and nouns are inflected. Those which appertain to verbs occupy the third lecture:- the fourth and fifth contain such as are affixed to nouns. The remaining three lectures treat of the changes which roots and affixes undergo in special cases, or by general rules of orthography, and which are all effected by the addition, or by the substitution, of one or more elements. The apparent simplicity of the design vanishes in the perplexity of the structure. The endless pursuit of exceptions and limitations so disjoins the general precepts, that the reader cannot keep in view their intended connection, and mutual relation. He wanders in an intricate maze, and the clew of the labyrinth in continually slipping from his hands."
Such a work as that above described being obviously unsuited for a beginner, a different arrangement of Panini's sutras was attempted by several grammarians, "for the sake of bringing into one view the rule which must be remembered in the inflections of one word, and those which must be combined even for a single variation of a single term." This arrangement Mr. Colebrooke adds, " is certainly preferable; but the sutras of Panini, thus "detached from their context, are whole unintelligible; without the commentator's exposition, they are indeed, what Sir William Jones has somewhere termed them, 'dark as the darkest "oracle.
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