Nirukta — Vedic Etymology

Nirukta (निरुक्त, "explained" or "spoken out") is the Vedanga of etymology and interpretation. By the time the Vedic hymns had been handed down for many generations, much of their vocabulary had become obscure: words had fallen out of use, changed meaning or appeared only once in the entire corpus. Nirukta set out to recover their meanings, chiefly by tracing each word to a verbal root and by comparing the contexts in which it occurs. If Shiksha ensures that the Veda is pronounced correctly and Vyakarana that its forms are correct, Nirukta ensures that it is understood. In the image of the Veda as a body, it is the ears.

Yaska and his Nirukta

Tradition remembers several schools of etymologists (nairuktas), but only one complete work survives: the Nirukta of Yaska. Yaska is generally dated to around the sixth or fifth century BCE, before Panini, and his book is one of the oldest Indian works of linguistic science. It consists of twelve chapters, with two supplementary chapters added later. In it Yaska names many predecessors — among them Shakatayana, Gargya, Aupamanyava and Aurnavabha — and records their disagreements, which makes the Nirukta a window onto a lively intellectual debate that is otherwise lost.

The Nighantu

Formally, the Nirukta is a commentary on the Nighantu, a collection of Vedic word lists. The Nighantu has five chapters. The first three (the naighantuka kanda) group words of similar meaning together — for example, the many Vedic words for earth, water, speech, cow or gold. The fourth (naigama kanda) lists difficult and ambiguous words that need individual explanation. The fifth (daivata kanda) lists the names of the deities of the hymns. Yaska explains these lists in turn, quoting Vedic verses to illustrate each word.

Yaska's theory of language

The four classes of words

Yaska opens with a classification of words that became standard in Indian linguistics:

• Nama — nouns, which present a thing as an entity (sattva).
• Akhyata — verbs, which present a process or becoming (bhava).
• Upasarga — preverbs such as pra, upa or ni, which modify the meaning of a verb.
• Nipata — particles such as ca ("and"), iva ("like") and na ("not").

He also records the view, attributed to Varshyayani, that there are six basic modifications of being: coming into existence, existing, changing, growing, declining and perishing — an early attempt to classify the meanings of verbs.

Do all nouns come from verbs?

The central debate of the Nirukta concerns the origin of nouns. The grammarian Shakatayana and the etymologists held that all nouns are derived from verbal roots. Gargya objected: if every noun came from an action, then anything that runs should be called a horse (ashva, linked to the root "to pervade" or "to travel"), and a thing would have as many names as it performs actions. Yaska defends the etymologists' principle while accepting that usage, not derivation alone, decides what a word actually denotes. His method is to look first at the accent and grammatical form; when these do not settle the matter, to look for a shared meaning; and never to give up on an explanation altogether.

Are the mantras meaningful?

Yaska also answers Kautsa, who argued that Vedic mantras are meaningless sounds whose value lies only in ritual use. Yaska replies that the mantras are meaningful because their words are the same as those of ordinary language, and adds a memorable image: "It is not the fault of the post that the blind man does not see it." The obscurity, in other words, lies with the reader, not the text — which is precisely why Nirukta is needed.

Interpreting the Vedic deities

The later chapters of the Nirukta deal with the gods of the hymns. Yaska reports the view of the etymologists that there are fundamentally three deities, associated with the three regions of the world: Agni on earth, Vayu or Indra in the atmosphere, and Surya in the sky; the many other gods are their aspects or functions. He explains divine names etymologically — Agni, for instance, as agrani, "the one who leads forward" — and notes that different schools interpret the hymns differently: the ritualists (yajnikas) in terms of sacrifice, the historians (aitihasikas) as accounts of ancient events, and the etymologists in terms of natural phenomena.

Significance and legacy

Many of Yaska's individual etymologies would not be accepted by modern historical linguistics, which compares Sanskrit with related Indo-European languages. But his achievement lies elsewhere: he treated the language of sacred texts as an object of rational analysis, proposed explicit principles for deriving meaning, and preserved the views of a whole generation of earlier scholars. The Nirukta was studied by later commentators such as Durga and Skandasvamin, and its method informs the great medieval Vedic commentaries, including that of Sayana. Its approach is a close relative of Vyakarana, from which it differs mainly in focusing on meaning rather than form, and it depends on Shiksha, since accent is often the key to how a Vedic word should be analysed.

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