This Sanskrit Grammar is on a somewhat different plan from those already in use. It presents the facts of the language primarily as they show themselves in use in literature, and only secondarily as they are laid down by the native grammarians. It also includes in the presentation the forms and constructions of the older language, as exhibited in the Vedas, the Brahmanas, the Epics and the Puranas. The author has cast all statements, classifications, etc., into a form consistent with the teachings of linguistic science. Care has been taken to facilitate the transition from the old to the new. It has been sought to help an appreciation of the character of the language by putting its facts as far as possible into a statistical form. With the practical needs of the students of the language in mind different sizes of type have been used to make the work very useful to the reader whose object is to acquire a knowledge of the Classical Sanskrit. A historical treatment of the facts of the language has also been made.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR William Dwight Whitney
William Dwight Whitney (1827–1894) was an American linguist, philologist, and lexicographer who edited The Century Dictionary. Born in Northampton, Massachusetts, February 9, 1827. He entered Williams College at fifteen, graduating in 1845. He continued studying and worked at a bank in Northampton for several years, then assisted his brother Josiah Whitney on a geological survey of the Lake Superior region in 1849. For three years, he studied Sanskrit in Germany, and gained wide reputation for his scholarship in the field. At Yale, he became professor of Sanskrit in 1854, adding comparative philology in 1869. He also taught modern languages at the Sheffield Scientific School. He served as secretary to the American Oriental Society from 1857 until he became its president in 1884.Whitney revised definitions for the 1864 edition of Webster's American Dictionary, and in 1869 became a founder and first president of the American Philological Association. He wrote metrical translations of the Vedas, and numerous papers on the Vedas and linguistics, many of which were collected in the Oriental and Linguistic Studies series (1872–74). He wrote several books on language, and grammar textbooks of English, French, German, and Sanskrit. In his Course in General Linguistics in the chapter on the 'Immutability and Mutability of the Sign', Ferdinand de Saussure credits Whitney with insisting on the arbitrary nature of the linguistic signs.
There are no reviews yet.