J Indian Philos (2007) 35:405412

DOI 10.1007/s10781-007-9032-6

Preface: The Generosity of Formal Languages

Frits Staal

All Rights Reserved Frits Staal 2008

adho dhah: pa
syatah: kasya mahima nopajayate /

upary upari pa
syantah: sarva eva daridrati //
If you always look down, you think you are big;
if you always look up, you know you are small.
The French mathematician dAlembert (17171783) wrote: algebra is
generous: she often gives more than is asked from her. A simple example is
(a + b) = (b + a). It applies to integers as in (2 + 3) = (3 + 2), but also to rational
and other numbers and geometrical figures under certain conditions. It applies
to natural languages also though there are exceptions as pointed out by British
philosopher Gilbert Ryle: She took arsenic and died is not the same as She
died and took arsenic.
Is Indian philosophy generous? The Journal of Indian Philosophy is, but let
us widen our net or change the direction in which it is cast and take a look at
_
Panini
who has always featured prominently in this journal: the first issue
discussed generalization by Pan: inyas among other topics (Cardona 1970). At
the beginning of his grammar, Pan: ini introduces the technique of pratyahara,
condensation. The sounds or syllables of the Sanskrit language are listed in


his Pratyahara-su:tras, later called Sivasu
tras, in such a manner that a, i and u, a
small group that is followed by the metalinguistic marker T: , may be condensed
into aT: . aT: is a condensation or abbreviation for a, i and u. Condensation is, in
other words, taking the first element of a list and attaching to it the marker of
the last in order to refer to the intervening elements as well. A small gain,

it may be
perhaps, but when the list is longer, as in ja, ba, ga, d: a, da S,


condensed to jaS which is an abbreviation for ja, ba, ga, d: a, and da. That
F. Staal (&)
67/1 Ban Pong,
Hang Dong, Chiang Mai, 50230, Thailand
e-mail: fritsstaal@berkeley.edu

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technique of condensation is generous because it can be applied not only to

syllables but to nominal and verbal endings as well.
After a successful and inspiring workgroup in 2002 on the emergence of
artificial or formal languages (Granoff et al. 2006), a second workshop was
organized to look into their generosity. That second workshop took place in
Amsterdam during May, 1819, 2006, and resulted in the nine articles that are
published here.
Following the alphabetical and therefore arbitrary order in which the
papers are published, I shall briefly introduce them in this Preface to the best
of my ability. The qualification is necessary because the object languages of
our authors include Arabic, German, medieval Italian, Malayalam and
Sanskrit. There is perhaps no person on the planet who happens to know these
five languages. Passages in the original that are quoted here will, of course, be
translated and explained for the benefit of the reader, but the disciplines
employed in these contributions also range widely. I have reduced them to
seven that go by the labels: algebra, generosity, linguistics, logic, mathematics,
Pan: ini and philosophy.
The names of these seven disciplines are only names, nama eva. At this
point, we should recall the adventurous list of sciences (vidya) in the
Chandogya Upanis: ad (7.1.1-4) which anticipated the more serious and factual
_
list of the Vedic sciences or limbs of the Veda (vedanga).
The seventh
chapter of the Upanis: ad starts with sage Narada asking Sanatkumara,
Eternal Youth, to teach him what he knows. Sanatkumara returns the
question: Tell me first what you know. Then Ill tell you what more there is to
know. Narada gives a long reply in which he refers to the four Vedas, the
corpus of histories and ancient tales, ancestral rites, mathematics, soothsaying,
the art of locating treasures, and the sciences of ritual, spirits, government,
heavenly bodies and serpent beings. All that, Sir, I have studied. Eternal
Youth responds wisely: All that is nothing but names (freely translated
after Olivelle 1996, pp. 156157).
If I write that algebra, generosity, linguistics, logic, mathematics, Pan: ini and
philosophy are only names, do I intend to imply that our authors do not
know what they are writing about? There is nothing further from my thought,
but it should be understood that each of these large disciplines have grown
beyond anyones understanding and that our authors are experts in using from
one or more of them precisely what they need. The names and disciplines
themselves are man-made. That holds for the distinctions not only between
large traditional groups such as the physical, human and social sciences, but
also between more specific ones like the ones I mentioned. It even pertains to
those that some of us tend to regard as deep and basicsay, the distinction
between physics and mathematics. I conclude that the list of modern disciplines and their demarcations from each other are just as arbitrary as they
were in the Upanis: adic list of sage Narada.
That disciplines are only names is illustrated in a special manner by the
inclusion of Pan: ini. No doubt, he was a person with a name. His grammar may
be regarded as a sub-discipline of linguistics. It is included because it features

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in several contributions of the workshop and constitutes a topic that was often
discussed by ancient and medieval Indian philosophers and continues to be
discussed by contemporary scholars. The position of algebra is similar in that
it is a sub-discipline of mathematics. Similar sub-disciplines or auxiliary disciplines are ancient astronomy and current computer science.
As for philosophy in general and Indian philosophy in particular, its literature has always been vast and dealt with matters that had little or nothing in
common with each other; until it came to focus on a more restricted range of
concepts and problems. I finally turn to logic which is similar to Pan: ini and
algebra in being a sub-discipline, but not just of philosophy as it is often
imagined to be. Logic provides a good example of how fickle are assignments
to disciplines or sub-disciplines because of its extraordinary and extraordinarily different backgrounds in Europe and in India (where they are relevant
even to our understanding of the Vedas: Staal 2008, p. 341).
In India, logic started around 300 BCE, when Kaut:alya or Kaut:ilya, political adviser of king Chandragupta Maurya, used the term anvks: ik, exam

ining, first employed in the Satapatha
Brahman: a and according to a later
Nyaya commentary a synonym of nyaya. In the mean time, a vast array of
arguments had been used c. 150 BCE by Patanjali in his Mahabhas: ya, certainly unsurpassed by any other contemporary work in force and precision but
without building a logical system (Scharfe 1961 and Staal 1963, eliciting further comments by Renou 1969, pp. 497498). When nyaya was incorporated in
what was later called the dar
sana system of philosophy, it concentrated on one
logical scheme that continued to dominate Indian logic. It was revolutionized
by Buddhist logicians like Dignaga (c. 480540 CE) who introduced what we
would nowadays call formal logic; that is, a logic that stands on the threshold
of being expressed by a formal or artificial language.
In Europe, the development of logic was totally different. According to a
distinguished logician and historian of logic (Bochenski 1951, p. 17), himself
inspired by another (Robinson 1942), the reading of Platos dialogues is
almost intolerable to a logician, so many elementary blunders are contained in
them. That sentiment is shared by Aristotle (384322 BCE), according to
whom formal logic was not a sub-discipline of anything but created out of
nothing by himself. Aristotles syllogistics dominated Arabo-European logic
for more than a millennium though the Stoa had developed another type of
logic and the European middle ages paid attention to semantics. Nowadays
logic is a province of mathematics (neglected by both Aristotle and Ibn Rushd
or Averroes) where it has become indistinguishable from set theory. Set
theory had been created by Georg Cantor in the late 19th century. According
to two learned historians of logic (by which they mean: European logic),
admirers of Cantors set theory talk of it as a dream creation but enemies treat
it as a nightmare (Kneale and Kneale 1962, p. 442). However, it is not set
theory, but axiomatic set theory, in some respects a return to Euclid (c. 300
BCE) though not to geometry, that led to some of the deepest insights of the
20th century because of the work of Alfred Tarski and Kurt Godel (Feferman
and Feferman 2004, p. 30 and passim). It would be difficult to claim that

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axiomatic set theory is a sub-discipline or sub-sub-discipline though it has

been provided with a name and may claim computer science as a cousin
(Feferman and Feferman, pp. 228230: Enter the Computer Scientists).
We will return to some of these topics but before the reader becomes
befuddled, I must emphasize that all our authors try to follow the Journals
policy of sometimes pursuing general questions that may be speculative, but
that are based on a close reading of primary sources.
I shall now introduce each article, repeat its title and put above it another
heading, specifying the object language of the writer (the subject language
does not matter since all of them write in English) and adding the labels of
their avowed disciplines or topics so that the reader has an inkling or a vague
direction in which to look, like someone gazing upon the ocean, hoping to see
a pattern or a fish and finding instead a dolphin.
Sanskrit. Generosity, Logic.
On the Generosity of a Natural Language
Kamaleswar Bhattacharya pursues some of the ideas he had developed in his
lecture during the first workshop (Granoff et al. 2006, pp. 513). He shows
how Raghunatha Siroman: i (c. 14751550) took basic concepts from the natural language of Sanskrit but combined them in a generous manner. In so
doing, Bhattacharyya answers two specific questions of Navya Nyaya logic:
whether omnipresent entities reside or do not reside in Time by the temporal
relation (kalika-sambandha) and whether inherence (samavaya) is multiple or
one.
Mathematics in a natural language: Malayalam.
The First Textbook of Calculus: Yuktibhas: a
P. P. Divakaran examines a Malayalam work of the mid-16th century which
described the development of infinitesimal calculus for the geometry of the
circle and the sphere. The proofs are written almost entirely in Malayalam, a
Dravidian language, without the help of a formal notation or even diagrams.
The absence of an efficient formal language may have played a role in preventing the Kerala work from realizing its full potential.
Sanskrit. Linguistics, Pan: ini.
Pan: inis As: :tadhyay and Linguistic Theory
Brendon Gillon gives a brief overview of Pan: inis grammar, showing that it
could address all of the central concerns of a formal grammar, including
questions that pertain to not only the syntax of Sanskrit but also its
semantics. He then shows that three concerns that are central to current
linguistic theorycompositionality, implicit arguments and anaphoric
dependencefigure centrally in Pan: inis grammar.

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Medieval Italian and others. Generosity, Mathematics.

Generosity: No Doubt, but at Times Excessive and Delusive
Jens Hoyrup starts from algebraic expressions or sign rules like less times less
makes plus, which the Italian mathematician Dardi of Pisa in 1344 turned
around by looking at apparent symmetries. He arrived at something that does
not make sense: generosity unwanted. The same holds for the absurdities
produced from 1895 by Cantors unrestricted acceptance of sets as members of
other sets. We should note that over-generosities in algebra and set theory
correspond to over-generalizations in natural language. If we know the English plural trees we can make plants, but children go too far when constructing
mans or sheeps.
Sanskrit. Linguistics, Mathematics, Computation, Pan: ini.
Positional Value and Linguistic Recursion
John Kadvany compares ancient relationships between linguistics and mathematics to modern ones. He uses Sanskrit positional number words and the
formal techniques of Pan: inis grammar to explain how modern mathematical
computation is constructed from linguistic skills and language structure.
Sanskrit. Mathematics, Computation.
Epistemology and Language in Indian Astronomy and Mathematics
Roddam Narasimha analyzes the epistemology of Indian mathematical
astronomy underlying three works of Nlakan: t:ha Somayaj (14441545 CE).
They exhibit careful observation and skill in the development of algorithms
and use of computation. Technical terms include parks: a, anumana, gan: ita,
upapatti, yukti, nyaya, siddhanta, vada, tarka and anves: an: a. They are compared
with theory, model, computation, positivism and empiricism. Earlier artificial
languages included equations but emphasized calculation, as in the Bakhshal
manuscript (800 CE?). Triggered by spectacular developments in computer
technology, current science assigns again a greater role to computation.
Arabic. Algebra, Mathematics.
Medieval Arabic Algebra as an Artificial Language
Jeffrey Oaks gives a historical account of the development of algebra applicable to Arabic and European languages. Starting in the ninth century with
systematic verbal solutions of equations, it reached a symbolic form in the
12th century in the western part of the Islamic world. Apart from complementing Charles Burnetts paper on the semantics of Indian numerals in
Arabic, Greek and Latin (Granoff et al. 2006, pp. 1530), Oaks illustrates how
elements of a formal language were born. Yet no revolution was initiated in

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mathematics by Arabic algebra: what had to be ousted first was Greek

geometry and that happened only in the 1718th century.
Sanskrit. Generosity, Logic, Mathematics, Pan: ini.
Artificial Languages Between Innate Faculties
After briefly discussing generosity in the artificial language of Pan: ini, Frits
Staal explores some of its Vedic sources. Since formal or artificial languages
are based upon combinations of natural language and mathematics, he discusses how those innate faculties or modules fused and developed differently
in the Vedic oral tradition and in the written traditions of the Near East,
Europe and China.
English, German and others. Linguistics, Logic, Philosophy.
Hand or Hammer? On Formal and Natural Languages in Semantics
Martin Stokhof discusses grammatical form and logical form in early 20th
century Euro-American analytical philosophy. Taking linguistics and the
philosophy of language into account, he wonders whether the distinction
between natural and formal languages can be maintained.
Conclusions
What do the papers of our workshop have to do with Indian philosophy? Let
us cast our net again. We are not only including the dar
sana literature but
Buddhist and Jaina insights and technicalities that range from those of the
grammarians to those of Navya Nyaya logic and Navya Vyakaran: a grammar.
If an English word were needed to characterize that wider perspective it
would be intellectualkeeping in mind that all labels are nama eva.
Like the first, our second workshop was concerned with language. The first
had discussed the thesis that not only natural languages, but artificial or formal
languages exist across sciences and civilizations. All participants did not
accept that thesis without qualification, but it was obvious that the intellectual
traditions of India played a leading part in its discussion. It showed vice versa
that those Indic traditions cannot be understood in isolation.
The second workshop, on which I am reporting here, includes six papers on
Indic patterns of thought. The remaining three articles show or imply that
similar ideas occur elsewhere. It is especially striking in the case of two disciplines: linguistics and mathematics, namny eva. In both cases, scientific
revolutions, so-called, are transitions from a natural to a formal language or
improvements and refinements in the formal language.
The Pan: inian revolution introduced an artificial language. Progress in that
language was made between Pan: ini and Patanjali and culminated in
Nagojbhat:t:a who, in the 18th century, did not only have a greater knowledge
of Patanjali than any of his predecessors, but was much more original and used

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the language of Navya Nyaya logic. He added a personal note in which he

distinguished himself from his predecessors who interpreted according to the
tradition (yathagamam): But I interpret the Bhas: ya and the Pradpa to the
best of my judgement (bhas: ya-pradpavyakhyanam
: kurve ham tu yathamati:
Thieme 1935, p. 199). No more labels!
In physics and mathematics (namn again), the first revolution became
effective when Euler and others replaced Newtons ambiguous Latin by
equations. The mathematical revolution of the 1718th century, to which
Jeffrey Oaks refers, replaced obscurities in the calculus by an artificial language that was more precise. It started on the European continent, leaving the
British Isles behind for another century.
I started this Preface with dAlemberts comment on the generosity of
algebra. That was in the 18th century and by that time, not only the Latin of
Newton had been replaced by English, French, German and especially
equations, but the geometry of Euclid, which Newton had copied in his
deductive system, was discarded. There is again a striking Indian parallel and
it starts with Vedic geometry. It too had to be overcome before Indic mathematics began to flourish with the Bakhshal Manuscript. In astronomy and in
a similar spirit, the ancestral (paitamaha) school, i.e., the Vedic tradition, was
rejected and the Surya Siddhanta prevailed.
It follows that the intellectual developments exhibited by Indian philosophy
are not unique for several reasons. It was only the pace of progress that was
totally different. Progress in the language of the calculus took a few centuries
but the corresponding development in the language of Pan: ini and Patanjali to
the language of Navya Vyakaran: a grammar took almost two millennia. Why?
The evolution of language depends on many circumstances, including the
environment. Languages spoken in remote Himalayan valleys do not change
as fast as Creole languages of the Caribbean.
One Indian philosopher who showed that the intellectual development of
Indian philosophy cannot be understood in isolation was Bimal K. Matilal,
Founding Editor of this Journal. Earlier, T. R. V. Murti had drawn attention
to the deep similarities between the eternality of language as propounded by
the schools of Mmam
: sa and Grammar and the Platonic theory of ideas (Murti
1963, p. xiii). That is not the end of the story and thus we return to generosity.
One afternoon in Bangalore, Roddam Narasimha, Vidyanand Nanjundiah
and I had a long talk. Having started as a physicist, Nanjundiah holds a
position for Molecular Reproduction and Development Genetics. He
explained to us that every structure is generous. There is at least one corollary.
The structures we need in our context should be sufficiently complex to
account for the emergence of two kinds of language among humans.
Vidyanands observation implies as a matter of course that all languages are
generous but all generous things are not languages. Generosity, in humanistic
parlance, has deep roots or, in a scientific jargon, is not confined to our species.
All participants in the workshop were pleased to see their papers published
in the Journal of Indian Philosophy and extend their gratitude to its generous
editor, Phyllis Granoff.

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We are again grateful to Marloes Rozing who organized our meetings on

behalf of the International Institute of Asian Studies (IIAS), which also
supported the workshop financially along with the Royal Netherlands
Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) and the Netherlands Organization
for Scientific Research (NWO). We express our deep appreciation for the
generous support of these institutions.

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