George Cardona

George Cardona (; born June 3, 1936) is an American linguist, Indologist, Sanskritist, and scholar of Pāṇini. Described as "a luminary" in Indo-European, Indo-Aryan, and Pāṇinian linguistics since the early sixties, Cardona has been recognized as the leading Western scholar of the Indian grammatical tradition (vyākaraṇa) and of the great Indian grammarian Pāṇini. He is currently professor emeritus of Linguistics and South Asian Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Cardona was credited by Mohammad Hamid Ansari, the vice president of India, for making the University of Pennsylvania a "center of Sanskrit learning in North America", along with Professors W. Norman Brown, Ludo Rocher, Ernest Bender, Wilhelm Halbfass, and several other Sanskritists.

Early life and education George Cardona was born in New York City on June 3, 1936. Cardona's PhD was in linguistics with a specialization in Indo-European ‒ by this time he had already begun studying Sanskrit grammar (vyākaraṇa) and related areas (especially nyāya and mīmāṃsā). While in India, Cardona studied under the tutelage of native Indian gurus, is dedicated), Ambika Prasad Upadhyaya, K.S. Krishnamurti Shastri, and Raghunatha Sharma. There, his earlier work in Indo-European studies at Yale slowly gave way to work primarily in Indo-Iranian and Indo-Aryan. His work on Indian grammar gained steam after his exposition of the Ṥivasūtras in 1969. ), which eventually culminated in his Pāṇini: His Work and Its Traditions in 1988, a current work-in-progress projected to be eight volumes.

Achievements and honors He has been formally recognized for his achievements numerous times: he was granted The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship while working on his PhD; in 1971–72, he was admitted as a fellow of the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences, Palo Alto; was selected as the Collitz Professor at the Summer Institute of the Linguistic Society of America at the University of Illinois (1978); was elected in 1984 and 1997 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, respectively; and served as President of the American Oriental Society from 1989 to 1990. native Indian tradition itself, in order to accomplish overtly historical and comparative objectives.

Another issue in Indology is the translation of Indian grammatical treatises. Cardona's take on this matter underscores the inevitable inadequacy ‒ indeed, the "useless[ness]" ‒ of translation. Staal offers an even more critical review: he argues, first of all, that Cardona's explication of the śivasūtras is not especially imbued with originality. Nonetheless, Staal credits Cardona for a more explicit formulation of Pāṇinian economy. This explicit formulation, according to Staal, gets across the idea that Pāṇini engaged in the practice of abbreviation not for the sake of brevity for its own sake, but rather conceived of descriptive abbreviation as an instrument of mediating between sāmānya 'the general' and viśeṣa 'the particular'. and Barend Faddegon (1936) were well aware that Pāṇinian methodology exercised abbreviation for the sake of insinuating functionality into and expressing generalization in grammatical treatment. Furthermore, Cardona seems to think that Whitney's assumptions inescapably tainted his methodology, hence the disagreement between Staal and Cardona, and 2) as a resource for linguists in Indic studies (Durbin claims this work would actually be more useful for the amateur needing a general grammatical overview of an Indo-Aryan language). In particular, she heavily criticizes Cardona's "disturbing"

Another criticism of Cardona's work has come from Szemerényi: his review of Cardona's Haplology in Indo-European centers primarily on the volume's thinness of "substance", as well as its physical thinness. As far as the "substance" of the volume goes, Szemerényi starts straight away by singling out Cardona's dictum that "haplology is not essentially separable from regular sound change amenable to formulation in terms of what are called sound laws". The majority of the review goes on to criticize this thesis as untenable because of its insensitivity to an essential difference from whom Cardona carried over the idea) that haplology, in relation to these forms, is a regular sound change. Cardona's attempts to maintain that Latin forms like dixti are instances of haplology-as-regular-sound-change Bhattacharya, wary of criticizing Cardona on matters relating to Pāṇini because of Cardona's distinguished authority, also notes several of Cardona's departures from conventional analyses. This includes, for instance, Cardona's deliberate commitment to the Indian commentarial tradition in its analysis of accent derivation.

Legacy Cardona's legacy is most felt in the discipline of Indian linguistics where he has exemplified ‒ indeed, championed ‒ an approach that seeks to describe and appreciate the techniques of the Indian grammarians. To an extent, Cardona may be characterized as 'historical' and 'philological' in his methodology. However, Cardona has concerned himself with the textual and historically explanatory aims of these approaches ‒ which were, in fact, the goals of earlier philological indology ‒ only insofar as they have enabled him to recover and uncover the linguistic science itself encoded in texts like Pāṇini's Aṣṭādhyāyī. In other words, textual analysis and historical explanation are incidental to Cardona's central priority to treat Pāṇini as an Indian linguist. As fidelity to the tradition figures prominently for Cardona, he has been mostly critical of attempts to compare Pāṇini and the Pāṇinīyas with modern Western grammatical notions. This stance, moreover, has served as a wellspring for debate, most notably with J.F. Staal and Paul Kiparsky. Along these lines, Brian Joseph's depiction of Cardona as a "luminary" in Pāṇinian linguistics warrants an assessment of Cardona as a veritable Pāṇinīya, carrying on the age-old exegetical tradition of Pāṇini's Aṣṭādhyāyī.

Publications 1962 R̥gvedic śrúvat. Journal of the Oriental Institute, Baroda 12:1-4 1963 Greek heîsa and Sanskrit sátsat. Language 39:14-16 1964 The formulation of Pāṇini. 7.3.73. Journal of the Oriental Institute, Baroda 14:38-41 1965 A Gujarati reference grammar. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 188 [circulated in duplicated form (pp. xv, 305), 1964] On translating and formalizing Pāṇinian rules. Journal of the Oriental Institute, Baroda 14:306-314 1966 The Indo-European thematic aorists. University Microfilms. Pp. 159 [doctoral dissertation, defended in 1960] 1967 Negations in Pāṇinian rules. Language 43 (Bloch Memorial Volume):34-56 Pāṇini's syntactic categories. Journal of the Oriental Institute, Baroda 16:201-215 1968 On haplology in Indo-European. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press (=Haney Foundation Series 1), pp. 87 1969 Studies in Indian grammarians, I: The method of description reflected in the śivasūtras. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, new series, 59.1, p. 48 1970 Some principles of Pāṇini's grammar. Journal of Indian Philosophy 1:40-74 The Indo-Iranian construction manā [mama] kr̥tam. Language 46:1-12 A note on Pāṇini's technical vocabulary. Journal of the Oriental Institute, Baroda 19:195-212 1974 Pāṇini's kārakas: agency, animation and identity. Journal of Indian Philosophy 2:231-306 1976 Pāṇini, a survey of research (Trends in linguistics, state of the art reports, 6) The Hague: Mouton, pp. xvi, 384 [new editions: 1980, 1998] 1979 Gujarati language and literature. Encyclopedia Americana 13:596 1988 Pāṇini: His work and its traditions. Part I: General introduction and background. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, pp. xxiv, 671 [second edition: 1997] 1989 Pāṇinian studies. New Horizons of research in Indology, edited by V.N. Jha (Silver Jubilee volume of the Centre of Advanced Study in Sanskrit, Pune), pp. 49–84 1992 Indian grammatical traditions and historical linguistics. in E. Polomé-W. Winter (eds.), Reconstructing Languages and Cultures. (Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter), pp. 239–259 1995 On Pāṇini, Śākalya, Vedic dialects and Vedic exegetical traditions. Beyond the Texts: New Approaches to the Study of the Vedas, edited by M. Witzel, pp. 26–32 1999 Recent Research in Pāṇinian Studies. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, pp. xi, 372 [second edition: 2004] 2007 On the position of vyākaraṇa and Pāṇini. Expanding and Merging Horizons, Contributions to South Asia and Cross Cultural Studies in Commemoration of Wilhelm Halbfass, edited by Karin Preisendanz (Beiträge zur Kultur- und Geistesgeschichte Asiens, Sitzungsberichte der philosophischen-historischen Klasse der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften), pp. 693 – 710 Pāṇini and Pāṇinīyas on what is and is not possible. Colonel Henry Scott Olcott Death Centenary Commemoration Volume, Brahmavidyā, The Adyar Library Bulletin 68 - 70 (2004 - 2006):467 - 499 [see 2002] 2011 Indological Researches: Different Standpoints, edited by P. C. Muraleemadhavan. Kalady: Sree Sankarachary University of Sanskrit. 2014 Pāṇinian grammarians on agency and independence. Free Will, Agency and Selfhood in Indian Philosophy, edited by Edwin Bryant and Matthew Dasti, Oxford/New York, Oxford University Press, pp. 85–111. Some contributions of ancient Indian thinkers to linguistics. In Sanskrit and Development of World Thought (Proceedings of "The International Seminar on the Contribution of Sanskrit to Development of World Thought"), edited by Vempaty Kutumba Sastry, Delhi: D.K. Printworld and Rashtriya Sanskti Sansthan, pp. 1–22.

Reviews

Staal, J.F. 1970 Studies in Indian grammarians, I: The method of description reflected in the śivasūtras (review). Language 46: 2, part 1, pp. 502–507.

Haag, Pascale. Madhav M. Deshpande et Peter E. Hook (éd.) : Indian Linguistic Studies. Festschrift in Honor of George Cardona. In: Bulletin de l'École Française d'Extrême-Orient. Tome 90–91, 2003. pp. 504–509.