Sphoṭa

( sa, स्फोट, ; "bursting, opening", "spurt") is an important concept in the Indian grammatical tradition of Vyakarana, relating to the problem of speech production, how the mind orders linguistic units into coherent discourse and meaning.

The theory of ' is associated with Bhartṛhari ( 5th century "Bhartrihari was long believed to have lived in the seventh century CE, but according to the testimony of the Chinese pilgrim Yijing ..he was known to the Buddhist philosopher Dignaga, and this has pushed his date back to the fifth century CE."), an early figure in Indic linguistic theory, mentioned in the 670s by Chinese traveller Yijing. Bhartṛhari is the author of the '' Vākyapadīya'' (" reatiseon words and sentences"). The work is divided into three books, the ''Brahma-kāṇḍa'', (or ''Āgama-samuccaya'' "aggregation of traditions"), the ''Vākya-kāṇḍa'', and the ''Pada-kāṇḍa'' (or ''Prakīrṇaka'' "miscellaneous").

He theorized the act of speech as being made up of three stages:
# Conceptualization by the speaker (''Paśyantī'' "idea")
# Performance of speaking (''Madhyamā'' "medium")
# Comprehension by the interpreter (''Vaikharī'' "complete utterance").

is of the ' "speech monistic" school which identifies language and cognition.
According to George Cardona, "Vākyapadīya is considered to be the major Indian work of its time on grammar, semantics and philosophy."

Etymology

While the ' theory proper (') originates with , the term has a longer history of use in the technical vocabulary of Sanskrit grammarians, and Bhartṛhari may have been building on the ideas of his predecessors, whose works are partly lost.

Sanskrit ' is etymologically derived from the root ' 'to burst'.
It is used in its technical linguistic sense by Patañjali (2nd century BCE), in reference to the "bursting forth" of meaning or idea on the mind as language is uttered. Patañjali's ''sphoṭa'' is the invariant quality of speech. The acoustic element (''dhvani'') can be long or short, loud or soft, but the ''sphoṭa'' remains unaffected by individual speaker differences. Thus, a single phoneme (''varṇa'') such as /k/, /p/ or /a/ is an abstraction, distinct from variants produced in actual enunciation.

Eternal qualities in language are already postulated by Yāska, in his ''Nirukta'' (1.1), where reference is made to another ancient grammarian, ', about whose work nothing is known, but who has been suggested as the original source of the concept.
The grammarian Vyāḍi, author of the lost text ''Saṃgraha'', may have developed some ideas in ''sphoṭa'' theory; in particular some distinctions relevant to ''dhvani'' are referred to by Bhartṛhari.

There is no use of ' as a technical term prior to Patañjali, but Pāṇini (6.1.123) refers to a grammarian named ' as one of his predecessors. This has induced Pāṇini's medieval commentators (such as Padamañjari, Haradatta) to ascribe the first development of the ' to '.

The account of the Chinese traveller

Yijing places a firm ''terminus ante quem'' of AD 670 on Bhartṛhari. Scholarly opinion had formerly tended to place him in the 6th or 7th century; current consensus places him in the 5th century. By some traditional accounts, he is the same as the poet Bhartṛhari who wrote the ''Śatakatraya''.

In the , the term ''sphoṭa'' takes on a finer nuance, but there is some dissension among scholars as to what Bhartṛhari intended to say. ''Sphoṭa'' retains its invariant attribute, but sometimes its indivisibility is emphasized and at other times it is said to operate at several levels.
In verse I.93, Bhartṛhari states that the ''sphota'' is the universal or linguistic type — sentence-type or word-type, as opposed to their tokens (sounds).

Bhartṛhari develops this doctrine in a metaphysical setting, where he views ''sphoṭa'' as the language capability of man, revealing his consciousness.
Indeed, the ultimate reality is also expressible in language, the ''śabda-brahman'', or "Eternal Verbum".
Early Indologists such as A. B. Keith felt that Bhartṛhari's ''sphoṭa'' was a mystical notion, owing to the metaphysical underpinning of Bhartṛhari's text, ''Vākyapādiya'', where it is discussed. Also, the notion of "flash or insight" or "revelation" central to the concept also lent itself to this viewpoint. However, the modern view is that it is perhaps a more psychological distinction.

Bhartṛhari expands on the notion of ''sphoṭa'' in Patañjali, and discusses three levels:
# ''varṇa-sphoṭa'', at the syllable level. George Cardona feels that this remains an abstraction of sound, a further refinement on Patañjali for the concept of phoneme- now it stands for units of sound.
# ''pada-sphoṭa'', at the word level, and
# ''vakya-sphoṭa'', at the sentence level.

He makes a distinction between ''sphoṭa'', which is whole and indivisible, and '' nāda'', the sound, which is sequenced and therefore divisible. The ''sphoṭa'' is the causal root, the intention, behind an utterance, in which sense is similar to the notion of lemma in most psycholinguistic theories of speech production. However, ''sphoṭa'' arises also in the listener, which is different from the lemma position. Uttering the ''nāda'' induces the same mental state or ''sphoṭa'' in the listener - it comes as a whole, in a flash of recognition or intuition (''pratibhā'', 'shining forth'). This is particularly true for ''vakya-sphoṭa'', where the entire sentence is thought of (by the speaker), and grasped (by the listener) as a whole.

Bimal K. Matilal (1990) has tried to unify these views - he feels that for Bhartṛhari the very process of thinking involves vibrations, so that thought has some sound-like properties. Thought operates by ''śabdana'' or 'speaking', - so that the mechanisms of thought are the same as that of language. Indeed, Bhartṛhari seems to be saying that thought is not possible without language. This leads to a somewhat whorfian position on the relationship between language and thought. The ''sphoṭa'' then is the carrier of this thought, as a primordial vibration.

Sometimes the ''nāda-sphoṭa'' distinction is posited in terms of the signifier-signified mapping, but this is a misconception. In traditional Sanskrit linguistic discourse (e.g. in Katyāyana), ''vācaka'' refers to the signifier, and 'vācya' the signified. The 'vācaka-vācya' relation is eternal for Katyāyana and the Mīmāṃsakas, but is conventional among the Nyāya. However, in Bhartṛhari, this duality is given up in favour of a more holistic view - for him, there is no independent meaning or signified; the meaning is inherent in the word or the sphoṭa itself.

Editions of the Vākyapadīya

*K. Raghavan Pillai (trans.), ''Bhartrihari. The Vâkyapadîya, Critical texts of Cantos I and II with English Translation'' Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1971.
*Wilhelm Rau, '' Vākyapadīya / die mūlakārikās nach den Handschriften hrsg. und mit einem pāda-Index versehen'', Wiesbaden : Steiner, 1977, Abhandlungen für die Kunde des Morgenlandes 42,4
*Wilhelm Rau, '' Vākyapadīya II : Text der Palmblatt-Handschrift Trivandrum S.N. 532 (= A)'', Stuttgart : Steiner, 1991, Abhandlungen der Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaftlichen Klasse, Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur Nr. 7,
* Saroja Bhate, ''Word index to the Vākyapadīya of Bhartr̥hari, together with the complete text of the Vākyapadīya'' (Delhi: Eastern Book Linkers, 1992.)
Open Library

Reception

Vyākaraṇa

''Sphoṭa'' theory remained widely influential in Indian philosophy of language and was the focus of much debate over several centuries. It was adopted by most scholars of Vyākaraṇa (grammar), but both the Mīmāṃsā and Nyāya. Adherents of the 'sphota' doctrine were holistic or non-compositional (''a-khanḍa-pakṣa''), suggesting that many larger units of language are understood as a whole, whereas the Mīmāṃsakas in particular proposed compositionality (''khanḍa-pakṣa''). According to the former, word meanings, if any, are arrived at after analyzing the sentences in which they occur. This debate had many of the features animating present day debates in language over semantic holism, for example.

The ''Mīmāṃsakas'' felt that the sound-units or the letters alone make up the word. The sound-units are uttered in sequence, but each leaves behind an impression, and the meaning is grasped only when the last unit is uttered. The position was most ably stated by Kumarila Bhatta (7th century) who argued that the 'sphoṭas' at the word and sentence level are after all composed of the smaller units, and cannot be different from their combination. However, in the end it is cognized as a whole, and this leads to the misperception of the ''sphoṭa'' as a single indivisible unit. Each sound unit in the utterance is an eternal, and the actual sounds differ owing to differences in manifestation.

The ''Nyāya'' view is enunciated among others by Jayanta (9th century), who argues against the ''Mīmāṃsā'' position by saying that the sound units as uttered are different; e.g. for the sound we infer its 'g-hood' based on its similarity to other such sounds, and not because of any underlying eternal. Also, the ''vācaka-vācya'' linkage is viewed as arbitrary and conventional, and not eternal. However, he agrees with Kumarila in terms of the compositionality of an utterance.

Throughout the second millennium, a number of treatises discussed the ''sphoṭa'' doctrine. Particularly notable is Nageśabhaṭṭa's ''Sphotavāda'' (18th century). Nageśa clearly defines ''sphoṭa'' as a carrier of meaning, and identifies eight levels, some of which are divisible.

Modern linguistics

In modern times, scholars of Bhartṛhari have included Ferdinand de Saussure, who did his doctoral work on the genitive in Sanskrit, and lectured on Sanskrit and Indo-European languages at the Paris and at the University of Geneva for nearly three decades. It is thought that he might have been influenced by some ideas of Bhartṛhari, particularly the ''sphoṭa'' debate. In particular, his description of the sign, as composed of the signifier and the signified, where these entities are not separable - the whole mapping from sound to denotation constitutes the sign, seems to have some colourings of ''sphoṭa'' in it. Many other prominent European scholars around 1900, including linguists such as Leonard Bloomfield and Roman Jakobson, "The science of language" chapter 16 in Gavin D. Flood (ed.) ''The Blackwell Companion to Hinduism'' Blackwell Publishing (2003), , pp. 357-358

Notes

Bibliography

*Saroja Bhate, Johannes Bronkhorst (eds.), '' - philosopher and grammarian : proceedings of the First International Conference on '', University of Poona, January 6–8, 1992, Motilal Banarsidass Publishers, 1997,
*Maria Piera Candotti, ''Interprétations du discours métalinguistique : la fortune du sūtra A 1 1 68 chez Patañjali et '', Kykéion studi e testi. 1, Scienze delle religioni, Firenze University Press, 2006, Diss. Univ. Lausanne, 2004,
*E. H. Clear, 'Hindu philosophy', in E. Craig (ed.), ''Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy'', London: Routledge (1998

*Harold Coward, ''The Sphota Theory of Language: A Philosophical Analysis'', Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1980.
*Alessandro Graheli, ''Teoria dello nel sesto Ahnikā della Nyāyamañjarī di '' (2003), University "La Sapienza" thesis, Rome (2003).
*Alessandro Graheli, ''History and Transmission of the . Critical Edition of the Section on the '', Wien: Akademie Verlag, 2015.
*Radhika Herzberger, ''Bhartrihari and the Buddhists'', Dordrecht: D. Reidel/Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1986.
*Jan E.M. Houben, ''The Sambanda Samuddesha and Bhartrihari's Philosophy of Language'', Groningen: Egbert Forsten, 1995.
*Subramania K.A. Iyer, ''Bhartrihari. A Study of Vâkyapadîya in the Light of Ancient Commentaries'', Poona: Deccan College Postgraduate Research Institute, 1969, reprint 1997.
*Tandra Patnaik, ''Śabda : a study of Bhartrhari's philosophy of language'', New Delhi : DK Printworld, 1994, .
*K. J. Shah, "Bhartrihari and Wittgenstein" in ''Perspectives on the Philosophy of Meaning'' (Vol. I, No. 1. New Delhi.)1/1 (1990): 80-95.

See also

*Nyāya

HOME


Content is Copyleft
Website design, code, and AI is Copyrighted (c) 2014-2017 by Stephen Payne


Consider donating to Wikimedia



As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases