Language and Language Teaching, Issue 2 - Azim Premji Foundation

All the three Sanskrit words for language,bhasha , vak and vani, denote the ‘soundsubstance’of language. The most significanteffect of this assumption was the rise ofphonetics as the first science in India and thesophisticated phonetic analyses achieved in thetradition. Panini’s grammar is also founded onthis assumption. The other two assumptionsconcern the philosophy of language and arerelevant here in so far as they encourage acertain plurality and tolerance of different waysof thinking and believing 5 .The assumptions about the nature of languageinspired a long line of thinking about therelationship between language, thought andreality and governed the teaching of language.Under the two aspects of object (grahya) andmeans (grahaka), and the three divisions oflanguage - substance, form and the potential ofwords to denote/connote –lay the objects oflanguage learning/teaching 6 .The theory of language, (bhasha, vak and vani),enshrined in linguistic texts such asAshtadhyayi, Mahabhashya, Vakyapadiyaand Upanishads. A Rgvedic chant says – “Maymy speech rest in mind and may my mind restin truth”. In one of the Upanishads, the humanbody is compared to the divine lute suggestingthat speech ought to be musical. 7In Indian language teaching theory, language isbest taught and learnt by teaching the grammarof the language which includes the bestspecimens of that language as examples.Patanjali in the first ahnika of his magnumopus 8 describes and argues the method ofteaching grammar. He defines grammar as ‘ashort precise enumeration of lakshana(markers or rules) of lakshya (language use orperformance)”. A Grammar according to himconsists of general rules (vidhi), exception rules(nishedha), uddharana (examples) andpratyuddharana (couter examples). Such ashastra, teaching text, is the economical meansof learning a language because language, beingopen ended, it cannot be learnt by the methodof learning words and sentences one by one.Should we teach by prescribing (vidhi) ‘the rightor acceptable usage’ or by proscribing(nishedha) the variant usages? He asks andanswers we should teach the acceptable usagesfor the universe of variation is endlessly large.The teaching-learning of language was primarilyin the oral frame-work as language was basicallyunderstood as speech and the writing practicefollowed speech as a secondary activity. Indiandefinition of intellect, prajna, being smriti +vimarsha + prayoga (memory + permutingwhat is in the memory + use at the right time),students were expected to memorise examplesof good, thoughtful or musical compositions inthat language. They later went on to hold thewhole texts in their mind 9 .A great controversy has raged in the Indiangrammatical tradition, from Patanjali throughBuddhists to Kumarila Bhatta, which bearsdirectly on the question of the role and place ofgrammar in language pedagogy. Panini’sAshtadhyayi is not a pedagogic grammar in thestrict sense - it is a linguistic grammar thatmakes explicit the native speaker’s knowledgeof Sanskrit. But this ‘knowledge’ is theknowledge of sadhu shabda the ‘acceptable’forms - the ‘rules’ that embody this knowledgegenerate the acceptable variety of language, bothwritten and spoken. Now this ‘norm’, if one mayuse this term, in Panini is an internally complexnorm - the language generated is not equal toany one actual ‘dialect’ of Sanskrit. And yet itis a ‘preferred’ form and a whole lot of dialectalvariants are asiddha. On what justifiablegrounds can we exclude those words that arewidely employed and as successfullycommunicate their meaning as the sadhushabdas? This is the crux of the controversy.The grammarians (Patanjali and Bhartrihari)argue that this precisely is the function ofgrammar - to lay down restriction (niyama).Language and Language Teaching Volume 1 Number 2 July 2012 44