--- In
ancientindia@yahoogroups.com, "Kishore patnaik"
<kishorepatnaik09@...> wrote:
http://fritsstaal.googlepages.com/soundbook
THE SOUND PATTERN
of
SANSKRIT IN ASIA
An Unheralded Contribution by
Indian Brahmans and Buddhist Monks
(by Dr Frits Staal)
Home
C o n t e n t s
1. A Vedic Discovery
2. Indic Scripts of Asia
3. South, Southeast and Central Asia
4. East Asia
5. Arabic
6. Siddham
7. Conclusions
Acknowledgements
Select Bibliography
Lecture given during the Inaugural Session of the International
Conference on"Sanskrit in Asia" to celebrate the Golden Jubilee of Her
Royal Highness Princess Mahachakri Sirindhorn at Silpakorn
University,Bangkok, June 23, 2005.
Subsequently published in Sanskrit Studies Central Journal. Journal of
the Sanskrit Studies Centre, Silpakorn University, 2 (2006) 193-2007.
*******************************
Your Royal Highness, Your Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen
1. A Vedic Discovery
It is a great privilege for me to be present here and discuss Sanskrit
in Asia on this special occasion. I am sure I speak for all of us who
participate in this conference and other visitors, when I say that we
are grateful to Your Royal Highness who is not only taking time from
more pressing duties, but who is also concerned with many languages
other than Sanskrit. I believe they include in alphabetic order
Chinese, English, French, German, Khmer, Latin and Pali, not to
mention Thai, which comes modestly at the end of this list because I
have followed the order of letters of the English ABC. I shall begin
my own inquiry with late Vedic, which is close to Classical Sanskrit
and comes even later than Sanskrit and Thai because "V" comes after
"S" an d "T" in all the Near Eastern and European alphabets that I
shall oppose to the sound pattern of Sanskrit. For I believe with
Plato that if we look at two opposites, side by side, and rub them
against each other, "we may cause justice to blaze out as from the two
kindling sticks" (Republic IV 435 a 1-2) the Greek equivalent of
agnimanthana in the Vedic fire ritual.
Classical Indian linguists adopted a synchronistic perspective because
they did not regard language as subject to change. We now know that
language evolves in a manner that is not altogether different from the
evolution of the species. Roughly speaking, Old-Khmer evolved into
Cambodian, Latin into Italian and French and Sanskrit into Hindi and
Marathi. The Vedic language went through three stages which are known
as Early, Middle and Late Vedic. Throughout the long period of their
evolution, from about 1700 to 500 BCE, Vedic Indians spoke Vedic by
definition, composed Vedic verse and prose, and transmitted these
compositions to future generations through recitation. It was an
exclusively oral tradition.
Toward the end of the Vedic period and at the western extremity of
Vedic India, in Koåala or Videha, not far in time and place from
the Buddha's birth reciters of the Veda made a major discovery
(Figure 1). They found that the consonants of a language are produced
by constricting the vocal tract at a particular point along its
stationary portion -- the palate or upper lip. If we move from the
larynx or throat to the lips, we pronounce ka, ca, øa, ta, pa. Each of
these syllables may be unvoiced or voiced, provided with more or less
breath, which may be made to pass through the nasal cavity as well.
Thus we produce, in the case of ka, the sequence ka, kha, ga, gha, òa;
and similarly for the other four consonantal stops. The two directions
are combined in the two-dimensional square or varga that is depicted
here. In order to complete the picture, a few other syllables have to
be added along with semi-vowels and vowels.
The Vedic system of the sounds of language exhibits and embodies what
is nowadays called phonetics, but is close to phonology which studies
features of those same sounds as parts of a system. The system
exhibits what I refer to as the sound pattern of Vedic, Sanskrit or
language. I do not imply that it is the same for all languages, but
most of the sounds of human speech may be accommodated in some such
scheme. During the Late Vedic period, the Vedic scheme was expounded
in the Åikæâ, the PrËtiÚËkhya and other compositions.
Figure 1. The Vedic System of the Sounds of Language
As far as I know, the Vedic discovery of the sound pattern of language
was made only once. Modern linguistics uses distinctive features, but
they would not exist if the sound pattern of language had not been
discovered earlier; by two-and-a-half millennia, as it happens. One
intermediary was PËÙini who composed his grammar one or two centuries
after the Vedic discovery. His grammar incorporated it, but his system
was different. The reason is not that the Vedic pattern is different
from that of Sanskrit. There are differences between the two and
Pâñini referred to some of them by rules that are marked chandasi, "in
the Veda." But
PËÙini composed an entirely new type of grammar for the spoken
language of his day, thereby laying the foundation for Classical
Sanskrit. It inspired not only many other grammars for Sanskrit,
Prakrit and other languages, including Jaina and Buddhist works, but
the great tradition of Sanskrit grammarians from Pataõjali to
Nâgojîbhaøøa as well as modern linguistics. It is Nâgojîbhaøøa who
ended his Paribhâæenduåekhara with what became a famous saying:
"grammarians rejoice over the saving of half a syllable as over the
birth of a son" (ardhamâtrâlâghavena putrotsavaä manyante vaiyâkarañâï).
The Vedic system of sounds that preceded PËÙini is nothing new to you.
Every literate Indian knows it, and I would venture to guess that,
among literate people, more than 50% understand it in Southeast Asia,
less than 50% in East Asia, and perhaps a handful of linguists if you
look west of South Asia. You may be surprised by my guess, but please
note that I have in the mean time shifted my language and refer now to
literate people which is something the Vedic Indians were not.
Looking back we detect a paradox. The discovery of the sound pattern
of Sanskrit was not made despite the absence of writing, but because
of it. The reason is simple: the discoverers were not hampered by any
written alphabet. Writing was invented or introduced later. The
resulting syllabaries were naturally arranged in accordance with the
earlier and superior, but orally-based system. That system was
rational, because it reflected the places of articulation in their
natural order; and practical, especially for languages in which
syllables consist of a consonant followed by a vowel. Japanese is such
a language and Sanskrit to some extent. So are many of the languages
of the Near East and of Europe but their alphabets are neither
rational, nor practical. They blocked insight into the nature of
language and served as obstacles to the development of linguistics.
Literacy takes us to another instructive contrast that is
socio-economic. We have, on the one hand, the difficult grammar of
PËÙini, a work of genius that rightly became famous but was studied by
a small elite of specialists, in India, other Asian countries, Europe
and the Americas. There is, on the other hand, the Vedic system, a
discovery that had a much wider appeal which is due to its rationality
and practicality both. It was beneficial to priests of the court and
the temple, Buddhist monks, astrologers-cum-astronomers and many
others whose writing skills were used in turn by royalty and other
rulers, land owners, bookkeepers, artisans, etc., thus affecting
larger segments of society. It appealed moreover to practical people
who liked to work with a writing system that was not just prestigious
but natural and effective at least in principle and initially,
before some of the writing systems began to exhibit labyrinthine
qualities.
The languages and inscriptions of South East Asia support these
socio-economic generalities. The Sanskrit inscriptions from Cambodia
contain words that are not found in Sanskrit dictionaries. One of them
is lekhin which refers to a scribe or secretary. We also find
abhyantaralekhin, "personal secretary" or, as Kamaleswar Bhattacharya
translates it, "secrétaire intime." The Sanskrit root is likh,
"scratch" or "write," and in Indic Sanskrit we come across derivatives
such as lekha- "document," lekhaka- "writer," lekhana "writing,"
etc.; but not lekhin. In Old-Javanese, similar derivatives are at
least apparent. Thus we have lekita which means "written evidence" and
is used in a court of law. It also refers to "by-laws of the village."
It may come from Sanskrit lekhita "written" or "caused to be written,"
but may be connected with Javanese lukita which means "thought
expressed in words" or "literary composition" and may in turn be
related to another term that is certainly native: lukis "drawn with a
pen." All this evidence suggests that the introduction of Sanskrit had
something to do with writing.
Why are such simple facts not mentioned by specialists in writing
systems? Because students of scripts generally confine themselves to
the shapes of letters and characters. It is well known that Indic
shapes were adapted in Central and Southeast Asia. But that is only
the least interesting part of the story as is demonstrated by the
fact, that the Indian system spread much further than the Indic
shapes. The sound pattern of Sanskrit was adopted and adapted in a
large part of Asia - including Central Asia, Korea, Japan and,
momentarily, in a grammar of Arabic composed in Iran. I refer to
adoption and adaptation because, in most cases, the Indic system was
not imitated slavishly but adapted creatively to new languages and
language structures.
Since our present enquiry is not concerned with shapes but with order,
epigraphy - another topic to which our guest of honor has devoted
years of study is of limited assistance. The same holds for
palaeography in the narrower sense. A typical example, de Casparis'
Indonesian Palaeography, subtitled A History of Writing in Indonesia,
is still the basic manual on the shapes of the characters but does not
refer to their order even once. I hope that epigraphists in Thailand,
where that rare and valuable discipline still flourishes, will look
for order and take it into account when they find it.
2. Indic Scripts of Asia
Figure 2 provides a geographical overview of the Indic Scripts of
Asia. It shows at a glance that the Indian system together with the
shapes of its syllables is confined to South and Southeast Asia. The
Indian system without the shapes was adopted and adapted in Central
Asia, Korea and Japan. Occasional uses of the system are found in
China and in Southwest Asia or the Near East.
Figure 2. Indic Scripts of Asia
3. South, Southeast and Central Asia
I start this brief overview with a mystery: the script of Kharoshthi,
probably the earliest Indic script, which was used in northwest India
and spread to Central Asia from about the fourth century BCE to the
third century CE. The order of syllables starts with a ra pa ca
na la da ba èa æa . . . That order is unexplained and the
script is called Arapacana after the first five syllables. It
possesses clearly Indic features: each syllable ends in a short a and
diacritic signs are added when that short a is replaced by another
vowel. The order of vowels, however, is not Indic but Aramaic: a e i
o u and not a i u e o. That order is also adopted by diacritics
attached to consonants from top to bottom when changing a into e, i, o
and u.
The other early Indic script is Brahmi. It is the paradigm of the
Vedic system. It influenced, directly or indirectly, via Pallava or
other medieval Indian scripts, all the scripts of South and Southeast
Asia that include (again in alphabetic order) Balinese, Bengali,
Burmese, Devanagari, Grantha, Gujrati, Gupta, Gurmukhi, Kannada,
Khmer, Lao, Malayalam, Nepali, Oriya, Pallava, Sinhala, Tamil, Telugu
and Thai.
The evidence for these influences is constituted by the scripts
themselves. Textual evidence for how the transmission occurred is less
common. The same applies to the evidence for Indian numerals. But
there is circumstantial evidence, in both cases. It is probable, for
example, that one of the Indian brahmans who transmitted the Vedic
paradigm to Cambodia, was the South Indian who belonged, according to
a seventh century Cambodian inscription, to the Yajurvedic school of
Taittirîya. The reason is that among the Prâtiåâkhya compositions that
explain the Vedic system, only the Taittirîya Prâtiåâkhya depicts the
Vedic square (varga) of Figure 1 in full.
I have excluded Javanese from the above enumeration because the order
of its syllables illustrates a different kind of principle from the
Vedic and alphabetic both: hana caraka, data sawala, padha jayanya,
maga bathanga. This list is Indic in form, and Old Javanese (Kawi)
retains the Indic device of writing consonant clusters by putting one
consonant symbol below another. But the creators do not seem to have
liked or understood the rationale behind the Indic order. What they
construed instead is a mnemonic jingle that includes one occurrence of
each of twenty of the twenty-two consonantal syllables of the Javanese
script. It has a meaning: "There were two emissaries, they began to
fight, their valor was equal, they both fell dead."
The chief Central Asian varieties are Khotanese, Tibetan and
`Phags-pa. The latter script was created from the Tibetan by the lama
of that name for the Mongol Emperor Qubilai or "Kubla Khan" as an
international script for his Asian Empire. Other Central Asian
scripts, such as Bactrian or Sogdian, do not concern us here because
they were not Indic but Aramaic in shape and order both.
The numbers of South, Southeast and Central Asian scripts that adopted
the Indic order is large. An attractive estimate occurs in the tenth
chapter of the Lalitavistara, called Lipiåâlâsaädaråanaparivarta, "the
revolution of displays of the mansions of writing." It lists 64
different scripts that were mastered by the Bodhisattva. The title of
the chapter is reminiscent of the Buddha's own dharmacakrapravartana.
It emphasizes instructively that the carriers of the sound pattern of
Sanskrit to other Asian regions were not only Indian Brahmans but
also, and in increasing numbers, Buddhist monks. It is explained at
least in part by the geographical facts with which I started: the
discovery of the sound pattern of language by Vedic reciters occurred
close in place and time to the areas where early Buddhism flourished.
It was a feature of civilization that Buddhists carried across Asia.
4. East Asia
The Chinese system of writing is so different from Vedic orality and
all that it entailed, that Indians had nothing to contribute. It
caused confusion since Chinese Buddhists believed that each Indic
shape was independent and had its own meaning, like many Chinese
characters. There were a few exceptions. Hsieh Ling-yün (384-433 CE),
poet and calligrapher, assisted by Hui-ju, a Buddhist monk, composed a
Sanskrit glossary in Chinese transliteration in the Indian order.
After the ninth century, rhyme tables were composed for each tone in
that same order.
The Hiragana and Katakana syllabaries of Japan adopted strokes from
Chinese characters, but reflect the Indic system which was gradually
adapted to the sounds of Japanese. An example from the Heian period is
pa pi pu pe po, which became subsequently fa fi fu fe fo, and has now
reached the form ha hi fu he ho. It is a classic illustration of the
difference between creative adaptation and slavish imitation. But it
did not please everyone and a poem was composed in which all but one
of the syllables were used once. Their order is not phonetic but
semantic. It is called Iroha after the first syllables: iro ha nioedo
chirinuru wo waga
and has been attributed to the famous philosopher
and calligrapher Kûkai or Kôbôdaishi to whom we will return. In
English translation, it says: "Colorful flowers are fragrant but they
must fall. Who in this world will live forever? Today cross over the
deep mountains of life's illusions; and there will be no more shallow
dreaming, no more drunkenness." It sounds better than the mnemonic
device used for Javanese but belongs to the same category.
The Korean Han-gul is the world's most perfect script. Even the shapes
of its syllables reflect the shapes of the mouth when producing sounds
as does, in English and other European languages, only the shape of
the letter "o," which may be seen as a picture of the rounding of the
mouth. The perfection of the Korean order is due to the Indic but is
fully adapted to the sound pattern of Korean. Han-gul was developed in
1444 CE by a committee of scholars, including Buddhist monks,
appointed by the Emperor of Korea. The committee report starts with
the basic insight: "The sounds of our country's language are different
from those of China."
5. Arabic
The case of Arabic deserves a separate lecture by an expert but I
shall try to summarize its most salient features. The order of letters
in the standard alphabet is based on their shapes (Figure 3). But
al-Khalīl bin Aïmad, teacher of Åibawayhi, author of the most famous
grammar of Arabic, introduced in the eighth century a new list in
which he had re-arranged the letters, starting in the back of the
mouth with the `Ain followed by Ïâ, Hâ, Khâ, Ghain, Qâf, Kâf, etc.
(same Figure 3). It is referred to as the Kitâb al-`Ayn.
Al-Khalīl was
probably born in Basra, but he wrote his grammar in Khorasan, the
easternmost part of Iran which is the gateway to India.
Al-Khalīl's Arabic grammar was not adopted by the Arab world. There
has been much controversy about the question whether it was inspired
by the Indic paradigm. Scholars have argued that Arabic is very
different from Sanskrit (it is), that there is no evidence
Figure 3. The Standard Arabic Alphabet and the Indian "Alphabet" of
the Kitâb al-`Ayn
that al-Khalīl studied the Prâtiåâkhya literature or other Sanskrit
treatises (true because he didn't), that borrowing of an alien system
without any of the details on which it rests is almost unknown (?),
that there were no contacts between Arab and Indian scholars at the
time of al-Khalīl (not true because there were such contacts in
mathematics), and so on. The argument, in brief, is based upon the
assumption that borrowing must be what I have called slavish imitation.
Having listened to me so far, you may already be inclined to conclude,
that al-Khalīl's grammar was inspired by the Indian paradigm. But we
need a reason or, at least, a more accurate account. Morris Halle
(personal communication) provides precise evidence of the influence of
the Vedic discovery on al-Khalīl's grammar. Al-Khalīl's order of
consonants is basically a linearization of the two-dimensional array
of Figure 1. Unless he knew the Vedic order, he would have no reason
to deviate from the traditional order of Arabic consonants as depicted
on the top of Figure 3. He furthermore extended the system by adding
the rear wall of the pharynx as a point of constriction. Put in more
general terms, it means this. In linguistics, as in mathematics, ideas
that are part of an oral tradition may be picked up by a brilliant
scientist, who does not study a text, let alone slavishly, but
understands the subject. Al-Khalīl was such a man. He went as far as
performing experiments, for instance, by putting his fingers in his
mouth. The ancient Indians may have done it too. But superior
qualities of the subject and the student are not enough. The Indic
system did not enter the Near East or Europe because of prejudice,
narrow-mindedness and plain ignorance.
6. Siddham
It would not be good to end my lecture on a negative note and so I
have kept the auspicious syllabary of Siddham for last. It will show
that I have omitted from our discussion a large area of patterned
sound, that of mantras and dharañîs. The Siddham syllabary was
construed, in the Indic order, for the expression of these sacred
syllables and their export to East Asia. The number that was exported
from India, sometimes in exchange for other goods, probably exceeds
that of any other commodity, although no attention seems to have been
paid to it by economic historians. Seekers, however, sought solace in
these treasures that were of easier access than the Sanskrit language
itself, which famous Chinese pilgrims had gone to India to learn, but
which was never studied seriously in China proper.
To illustrate the export of the Siddham, we return once more to the
Japanese Buddhist monk Kûkai or Kôbôdaishi, who was born in the eighth
century. Kûkai went to China and studied the Siddham script with
Prajõa, a monk from Kashmir who was translating Tantric texts. After
his return to Japan, Kûkai built a monastery at Koyasan which became
the center of the Shingon sect. He taught his pupils mantras and
dharañîs and how to write them in the Siddham script. Figure 4 depicts
a scroll from Koyasan with the Siddham character A.
Figure 4. Siddham "A" from Koyasan
7. Conclusions
I derive five conclusions from our brief discussion. The first is that
the sound pattern of Sanskrit was adopted and adapted by many writing
systems of Asia. The exporters were Indian brahmans and Buddhist
monks. The second is that the pattern that underlies the system was
not always understood. The third is that those Asian writing systems
are applications of a theory of language, just as airplanes are
applications of the laws of aerodynamics. The fourth, closely
connected, is that a writing system is only as good as the theory upon
which it is based. (Since the accuracy of theories is measured in
degrees, absence of any theory points to probability zero.) My fifth
and final conclusion is hypothetical in character. If the sound
pattern of Sanskrit had also reached the Near East and Europe, there
would not be so many clumsy alphabets around and the modern world
would have the benefit of rational and practical Indic syllabaries in
addition to rational and practical Indic numerals.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am deeply grateful to Dr. Samniang Leurmsai of the Sanskrit Studies
Centre, Silpakorn University, Bangkok, for inviting me to speak in
the inaugural session on June 23, 2005, of the International
Conference on "Sanskrit in Asia" to celebrate the Golden Jubilee of
the Birth of Her Royal Highness Princess Mahachakri Sirindhorn.
When preparing this paper, I saw that Richard Salomon was about to
address the 215th meeting of the American Oriental Society at
Philadelphia of March 20, 2005, on "On Alphabetical Order in India,
and Elsewhere." I was unable to attend that meeting but I wrote to
Richard and he very kindly sent me a draft of his paper. It became
obvious that both of us shared an interest in the order of characters,
and not only in their shapes like many other students of scripts. It
turned out also that both of us made use of the 1996 manual on The
World's Writing Systems (WWS) by Peter T. Daniels and William Bright
(see Select Bibliography below), to which Richard had already
contributed the section on Brahmi and Kharosthi. I have learned much
from Richard Salomon's contributions and our subsequent
correspondence. Our contributions are in some respects complementary
but the reader will note that there are differences between our
approaches. My own approach reflects the wider context of Staal 2005.
WWS itself calls for additional comment. It is learned and
informative. It has been widely praised, especially from the point of
view of Semitic Linguistics (Kaye 2003). However, its adherence to the
International Phonetic Alphabet is baffling to the intended wide
audience and obscured further by the idiosyncratic terminologies of
both editors and the careless use of many other technical and
semi-technical terms that are nowhere explained. Even the concept of
"syllabary" is regarded as a kind of alphabet; as in the Oxford
Dictionary, which declares that a syllabary serves "the purpose of an
alphabet". It is not and does not and these verdicts are simply
cultural constructs.
Truly fatal to the subject of WWS is its atomistic approach which, in
many of its sections, obliterates the intimate relationships that
exist between the scripts they deal with. The contributions by
Christopher Court, Leonard van der Kuijp and Richard Salomon's own are
free from this defect, and William Bright recognizes that "the
traditional order of symbols in the Indian scripts is based primarily
on articulatory phonetics, as originally developed for Sanskrit by the
ancient pandits" (page 384). But the 113 pages on South and Southeast
Asia in this tome of 922 pages, the only ones that study a writing
system that is rational and practical, are seriously misleading, not
on the whole but as a whole. That has, furthermore, a curious
implication. If we omit some pages from the South and South East Asian
section that do not reflect the Indic system, and add a few on Korean
and Japanese that do, we are left with some 800 pages that are
expressly devoted to the description of irrationalities and
impracticalities that are a disgrace to homo sapiens though not the
only one.
I can summarize my comments best by quoting from my own paper its
fourth conclusion. The editors seem to ignore the fact that their
phonetic approach, which mirrors the Indic system, lacks its
fundamental insight: "a writing system is only as good as the theory
upon which it is based."
Linguists will have noted that the expression "sound pattern" evokes
Morris Halle's "Sound Pattern of Russian" of 1959 and Chomsky and
Halle's "Sound Pattern of English" of 1968. What was meant there is
clearly explained in the Preface to the second book: "we are not, in
this work, concerned exclusively or even primarily with the facts of
English as such. We are interested in these facts for the light they
shed on linguistic theory (on what, in an earlier period, would have
been called universal grammar) and for what they suggest about the
nature of mental processes in general." That Chomsky and Halle's book
is inspired by the Indic tradition is clear from its final rule, which
is identical with the final rule of PËÙini 's grammar: "a a."
In later publications, Noam Chomsky did not shy away from the
expression "universal grammar." My present contribution is different
from all these important works. It is only a brief discussion, but it
is concerned with applications, history and practicalities as well as
theory. I have tried to show how the Vedic discovery is based on a
theory of language that may be used in discussing the contributions of
Sanskrit to Asian societies and to civilization. These are ambitious
efforts and some of the few steps I have taken may have been unsteady.
I hope that readers will render assistance in discussing, confirming,
refuting or amending what I have written.
Staal 2005 is concerned with the theory and development of language,
natural as well as artificial. It lists the publications on Arabic and
Japanese that I have used for the present paper also. Here I like
again to express my indebtedness for guidance and references to
Professors Oscar von Hinüber, Richard C. Martin, Kees Versteegh, W.J.
Boot and Michio Yano. Special thanks go to Professor Morris Halle of
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for a significant correction
and important observation mentioned in the body of the text. My final
acknowledgments go to Edward M. Stadum and Peter Vandemoortele for
their help with the illustrations and powerpoints that were part of
the presentation.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Allen, W.S. (1953), Phonetics in Ancient India. London etc.: Oxford
University Press.
Alpert, Harvey P., ed. (1989), Understanding Mantras. Albany: State
University of New York Press.
Bhattacharya, Kamaleswar (1961), Les religions brahmaniques dans
l'ancien Cambodge, d'apres l'épigraphie et l'iconographie, Paris:
Ecole fran©aise d'extreme orient XLIX.
Bhattacharya, Kamaleswar (1964), "Recherches sur le vocabulaire des
inscriptions sanskrites du Cambodge," Bulletin de l'école fran©aise
d'extreme-orient 102/1:1-72.
Bhattacharya, Kamaleswar (1966), "Supplément aux recherches sur le
vocabulaire des inscriptions sanskrites du Cambodge," Bulletin de
l'école fran©aise d'extreme-orient 103/1:273-77.
Bhattacharya, Kamaleswar (1997), "The Religions of Ancient Cambodia,"
in: Sculpture of Angkor and Ancient Cambodia. New York: Thames and
Hudson, 34-52.
Brough, John, (1977) "The Arapacana Syllabary in the old
Lalitavistara," Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies
40:85-95. Republished in Hara and Wright, eds., 450-60.
Casparis, J.G. de (1975), Indonesian Palaeography. A History of
Writing in Indonesia from the Beginnings to c. A.D. 1500. Leiden: E.J.
Brill. Handbuch der Orientalistik II, 4, 1.
Casparis, J.G. de and I.W. Mabbett (1992, 1999), "Religion and Popular
Beliefs of South East Asia before c. 1500," in: Tarling, ed., 276-339.
Chomsky, Noam and Morris Halle (1968), The Sound Pattern of English.
New York etc.: Harper and Row. Studies in Language.
Coedes, G. (1964), Les états hindouisés d'Indochine et d'Indonésie.
Paris: E. de Boccard.
Court, Christopher (1996), "Introduction" and "The Spread of Brahmi
Script into Southeast Asia," in: Daniels and Bright, eds., 443-49.
Daniels, Peter T. and William Bright, eds., (1996) The World's Writing
Systems. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Deshpande, Madhav M. (1997), Åaunakîyâ Caturâdhyâyikâ. A Prâtiåâkya of
the Åaunakîya Atharvaveda. Cambridge and London: Harvard University
Press. Harvard Oriental Series,Vol. 52.
Faddegon, Barend (1948), "The Semitic and Sanskrit Alphabets," in:
Orientalia Neerlandica. A Volume of Oriental Studies. Leiden: A.W.
Sijthoff: 261-72.
Filliozat, Jean (1947). "Paléographie" in: Renou and Filliozat, L'Inde
Classique, Vol.2, 665-712.
Flood, Gavin, ed. (2003), The Blackwell Companion to Hinduism. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Gonda, J. (1952), Sanskrit in Indonesia, Nagpur: International Academy
of Indian Culture. Sarasvati Vihara Series Vol. 28.
Granoff, Phyllis, Frits Staal and Michio Yano, eds. (2005), The
Emergence of Artificial Languages. Proceedings of the International
Workshop on Asian Contributions to the Formation of Modern Science I.
International Institute of Asian Studies, Leiden University, September
20-21, 2002. Journal of Indian Philosophy.
Gulik, R.H. van (1980), Siddham. An Essay on the History of Sanskrit
Studies in China and Japan. Delhi: Åata-Piøaka Series, Vol. 247.
Hall, Kenneth R. (1992, 199), "Economic History or Early Southeast
Asia," in: Tarling, ed., 183-275.
Halle, M. (1959), The Sound Pattern of Russian. The Hague: Mouton.
Hara, Minoru and J.C. Wright, eds. (1996), John Brough: Collected
Papers. London: School of Oriental and African Studies, University of
London.
Hino, Shoun and Toshihiro Wada (2004), Three Mountains and Seven
Rivers. Prof. Musashi Tachikawa's Felicitation Volume. Delhi: Motilal
Banarsidass.
Kaye, Alan S. (2003), "Semitic Linguistics in the New Millennium."
Journal of the American Oriental Society 123.4: 819-34.
Krom, N.J. (1923), "Geschiedenis van Java in den Hindoe-tijd," in:
Inleiding tot de Hindoe-Javaansche Kunst, Vol. I, Chapter 2: 43-86.
Kuijp, Leonard W.J. van der (1996), "The Tibetan Script and
Derivatives," in: Daniels and Bright, eds., 431-41.
Penrose, Roger (1997 etc.), The Large, the Small and the Human Mind.
Cambridge: University Press.
Renou Louis (1960), "La forme et l'arrangement interne des
Prātiśākhya," Journal asiatique 1-40.
Renou, Louis and Jean Filliozat (1947), L'Inde Classique. Manuel des
études indiennes. Vol.1, Paris: Payot. Vol. 2, Paris: Imprimerie
nationale, Hanoi: Ecole fran©aise d'extreme orient.
Salomon, Richard G. (1996), "Brahmi and Kharoshthi," in: Daniels and
Bright, eds., 373-383.
Salomon, Richard G. (2005), "On Alphabetical Order in India, and
Elsewhere." Draft for Plenary Session on Scripts and Writing, 215th
meeting of the American Oriental Society, Philadelphia PA, March 20.
Staal, J.F. (1972), "Early Accounts (Hsuan Tsang, I Tsing, Fa Tsang,
al-Bîrûnî, Târanâtha)" in: Staal, J.F., ed., 4-26.
Staal, J.F., ed., (1972), A Reader on the Sanskrit Grammarians. MIT:
Cambridge and London. Studies in Linguistics, Vol. 1.
Staal, Frits (1989), "Vedic Mantras," in Alpert, ed., 48-95.
Staal, Frits (1989, 1993), Rules without Meaning. Ritual, Mantras and
the Human Sciences. New York etc.: Peter Lang. Reprint 1996: Ritual
and Mantras: Rules without Meaning. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.
Staal, Frits (1995), Mantras between Fire and Water. Reflections on a
Balinese Rite. With an Appendix by Dick van der Meij. Amsterdam etc.:
North Holland. Verhandelingen Afdeling Letterkunde, Nieuwe Reeks, Deel
166, Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen.
Staal, Frits (1998), Review of Hara and Wright, eds. (1996), Bulletin
of the School of Oriental and African Studies 61:25-26.
Staal, Frits (2003), "The Indian Sciences: Introduction" and "The
Science of Language," in: Flood, ed., 345-59.
Staal, Frits (2004), "Three Mountains and Seven Rivers." in: Hino and
Wada, eds., 3-24.
Staal, Frits (2005), "Artificial Languages across Sciences and
Civilizations" in: Granoff, Staal and Yano, eds.
Tarling, Nicholas, ed. (1992, 1999), The Cambridge History of
Southeast Asia, Vol.I: From Early Times to c. 1500. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Thieme, Paul (1935), Pâñini and the Veda. Studies in the Early History
of Linguistic Science in India. Allahabad: Globe Press.
Thieme, Paul (1982-83), "Meaning and Form in the `Grammar' of Pâñini,"
Studien zur Indologie und Iranistik 8/9: 3-34.
Varma, Sidheshwar (1961), Critical Studies in the Phonetic
Observations of Indian Grammarians. London: Royal Asiatic Society.
Delhi: Munshi Ram Manohar Lal.
Zürcher, E. (1959), The Buddhist Conquest of China. The Spread and
Adaptation of Buddhism in Early Medieval China. Leiden: E.J. Brill.
--- End forwarded message ---