Reading Pāṇini · Part 2

Where Sounds Are Born

✦ This post includes an interactive map of the mouth: click any letter and see where it is born. Jump to it ↓

A map you learnt as a child

Most of us who grew up with an Indian language learnt the alphabet as a chant: ka kha ga gha ṅa, ca cha ja jha ña, ṭa ṭha ḍa ḍha ṇa … It seems like a list to be memorised, nothing more.

It isn’t. The वर्णमाला (varṇamālā), the “garland of letters”, is a map of the human mouth. Its rows walk from the back of your throat to your lips. Its columns record how you breathe and whether your voice hums. Once you see the map, you can never hear the alphabet as a mere list again.

In Part 1 we met Pāṇini’s fourteen Māheśvara Sūtras and saw that they scramble this familiar order on purpose. To appreciate why, we first need the order they scramble. This post is about that order: the ancient Indian science of where and how sounds are made.

Śikṣā: the nose of the Veda

Remember the verse from Part 1 that pictured the Veda as a person? Grammar was its mouth. Its nose was शिक्षा (śikṣā), phonetics: the science of how each sound is produced and pronounced.

The reason was practical. The Vedas were passed down orally for many centuries, and a single sound changed or misplaced could change the meaning of a hymn. So Vedic schools developed phonetic manuals of remarkable precision: the प्रातिशाख्य (Prātiśākhya) texts, each attached to a particular Vedic recension, and short verse treatises such as the पाणिनीय शिक्षा (Pāṇinīya Śikṣā).

These works describe speech the way an anatomist describes the body. They name the parts of the mouth, say which part of the tongue touches where, how much breath passes, and whether the voice hums. The British phonetician W. S. Allen, in his classic study Phonetics in Ancient India (1953), showed how far ahead of its time this analysis was; European phonetics reached comparable precision only in the nineteenth century.

Pāṇini built on this science rather than repeating it. His grammar takes the phoneticians’ findings for granted and uses them in its rules, as we will see at the end of this post.

Where: the places of articulation

Every consonant is made by narrowing or closing the passage of air somewhere between the throat and the lips. The phoneticians called that spot the sound’s स्थान (sthāna), its “place”. They identified five main places, ordered from the back of the mouth to the front, plus the nose.

The rows of the alphabet move from the back of the mouth (1) to the lips (5). The nasal sounds add the nose (N) to their own place.

The tradition sums this up in a set of short formulas, recited by students of grammar to this day. The first one gives this post its theme:

Two sounds you will meet rarely also have places: the जिह्वामूलीय (jihvāmūlīya), a breathy sound before k and kh, is made at the root of the tongue; the अनुस्वार (anusvāra, ं) is made in the nose.

Modern phonetics uses different names for the same places: velar for the k-row, palatal for the c-row, retroflex for the ṭ-row (the tongue tip curls back towards the roof), dental for the t-row and labial for the p-row. The categories are the same; they were simply named in Sanskrit first.

Notice that the compound vowels are described exactly as a phonetician would describe them today. e begins at the throat (a) and glides towards the palate (i). o begins at the throat and glides towards the lips (u). That is why Pāṇini’s rule 6.1.87, which we met in Part 1, fuses a + i into e and a + u into o: the fused sound is literally made in both places at once.

How: the effort inside the mouth

Place alone does not identify a sound. k, h and a are all made at the throat, yet they are obviously different. The second ingredient is प्रयत्न (prayatna), “effort”: how the speech organs act at that place.

The tradition states the whole scheme in a compact passage, usually given alongside Pāṇini’s rule 1.1.9. It opens:

The internal effort, आभ्यन्तर प्रयत्न (ābhyantara prayatna), happens inside the mouth. It describes how closely the tongue or lips approach the place. The passage goes on to assign each degree to a class of sounds:

The fifth degree, संवृत (saṃvṛta), “closed”, belongs to just one sound: the short a as it is actually pronounced, which is more closed than its long partner ā. The passage adds a subtle note: while the grammar’s rules are being applied, short a is treated as open like ā, so that the two count as the same kind of sound. Only in actual speech does it close.

The traditional name for the stops, स्पर्श (sparśa), means “touch”. The semivowels are called अन्तःस्थ (antaḥstha), “standing in between”, because they sit between consonants and vowels. The sibilants are ऊष्मन् (ūṣman), “heat” or “steam”: sounds made of escaping breath.

So k, h and a share the throat but differ in effort: k closes it fully, h narrows it, a leaves it open.

Breath and voice: the effort outside the mouth

The second kind of effort, बाह्य प्रयत्न (bāhya prayatna), happens below the mouth, at the vocal cords and in the stream of breath. The tradition lists eleven such efforts, but two pairs do most of the work:

• Voice. In घोष (ghoṣa) sounds the vocal cords vibrate: g, j, d, b, the nasals, the semivowels, h and all vowels. In अघोष (aghoṣa) sounds they don’t: k, c, t, p and the sibilants. Put a finger on your throat and say ssss then zzzz: the buzz you feel in the second is ghoṣa.
• Breath. महाप्राण (mahāprāṇa), “great breath”, sounds release a puff of air: kh, gh, ch, jh and so on, plus the sibilants and h. अल्पप्राण (alpaprāṇa), “little breath”, sounds don’t: k, g, c, j. Hold a sheet of paper in front of your lips and say pa then pha: the paper moves for the second.

The same passage names all eleven external efforts:

Then it says which sounds take which, and here is the delight: it does so in Pāṇini’s own shorthand, the pratyāhāras from Part 1.

Read those four lines against the 5 × 5 grid below and you will see that voice divides the grid into its left two columns and its right three, while breath picks out columns 2 and 4. The phoneticians’ description and Pāṇini’s notation fit each other exactly.

The remaining efforts include the three Vedic pitch accents, उदात्त (udātta, raised), अनुदात्त (anudātta, not raised) and स्वरित (svarita, sounded or falling), which govern how Vedic vowels are chanted. They matter greatly for chanting, and we will return to them in a future post on śikṣā.

The 25 stops: a 5 × 5 table at the heart of the varṇamālā

Now put place and effort together, and the familiar alphabet reveals itself. The 25 stops, the वर्गीय व्यञ्जन (vargīya vyañjana), form a perfect grid. Each row (वर्ग, varga) is one place, moving from the back of the mouth to the front. Each column is one combination of voice and breath.

Read across any row and you hear one place of articulation trying every kind of breath and voice. Read down any column and you hear one manner of speaking travelling from your throat to your lips. The chant ka kha ga gha ṅa is a systematic sweep through a two-dimensional table.

The sounds outside the grid, the अवर्गीय (avargīya), follow the same plan:

• Semivowels य र ल व (y r l v): palate, roof, teeth, then teeth-and-lips. From back to front, they march in exactly the order of the c-, ṭ-, t- and p-rows.
• Sibilants श ष स (ś ṣ s): palate, roof, teeth, in the same order again, followed by ह (h) at the throat.
• Vowels begin with the simple vowels of the throat, palate and lips (अ इ उ, a i u), then add the r- and l-vowels ऋ ऌ (ṛ ḷ) of the roof and teeth, then the compound vowels ए ऐ ओ औ (e ai o au).

Nothing in this alphabet is in its place by accident.

Try it in your own mouth

This takes thirty seconds, and it is the best way to believe everything above.

1. Say ka, ca, ṭa, ta, pa slowly, one after another. Pay attention to your tongue. It touches the soft back of the palate for ka, the hard palate for ca, curls back to the roof for ṭa, touches the back of your teeth for ta, and then gives way to your lips for pa. You have just walked the first column of the grid, from throat to lips.
2. Now say ka, kha, ga, gha, ṅa with a finger on your throat and the back of your other hand in front of your mouth. You will feel no buzz and little breath for ka, a puff for kha, a buzz for ga, buzz and puff for gha, and the sound moving into your nose for ṅa. That is one row, all five columns.
3. Finally, hold ssss, then ṣṣṣṣ (tongue curled back), then śśśś (tongue against the palate). Three hissing sounds, three places, one effort.

The ancient phoneticians had no X-rays, no spectrograms and no recording equipment. They had attention, patience and generations of careful listening. What you just felt in your own mouth is what they wrote down.

Back to Pāṇini

Pāṇini does not re-teach phonetics. He uses it. Early in the Aṣṭādhyāyī, one short rule turns everything in this post into a single technical term:

सवर्ण (savarṇa) means “of the same kind”. By this rule, short a, long ā and the extra-long (pluta) ā3 used in calling out are savarṇa: same place, same effort, different length. So are all five sounds of the k-row: same place (throat), same internal effort (full contact).

The very next rule adds a safety catch:

Notice how it is written: nā + ac + halau, “not ac and hal”. Those are the pratyāhāras from Part 1: ac, all vowels, and hal, all consonants. Without this rule, a vowel and a consonant made at the same place, such as i and ś at the palate, could count as “the same kind”, and sandhi rules would wrongly treat them alike.

The formula that uses its own notation

Look again at our title formula: a-ku-ha-visarjanīyānām. Why ku rather than listing k, kh, g, gh, ṅ?

Because of another of Pāṇini’s conventions (rule 1.1.69): a sound marked with a following u stands for itself and all its savarṇa sounds. So ku means the whole k-row, cu the whole c-row, ṭu, tu and pu the others. The same rule explains a detail from Part 1: why the vowel a in a pratyāhāra also stands for long ā.

These place formulas are not in the Aṣṭādhyāyī itself. They come from the grammatical tradition, which quotes them alongside rule 1.1.9, and they are written in Pāṇini’s own compressed notation. Phonetics and grammar, the nose and the mouth of the Veda, speak the same language.

Two orders, two purposes

We now have two arrangements of the same sounds, and each is right for its job.

Think of a city. The varṇamālā is the street map, drawn true to geography. The Māheśvara Sūtras are the metro map, deliberately distorted so that every route you need becomes a straight line. You can see both side by side in the Pratyāhāra Explorer: pick a group in Pāṇini’s order and watch it light up in the varṇamālā grid. Many of his groups turn out to be whole columns of the grid.

Coming up next

In Part 3: Six Kinds of Rules, we open Pāṇini’s toolbox. Some sūtras define terms, like savarṇa in this post; some perform operations; some are rules about rules; and some silently lend their words to the sūtras that follow.

Notes and further reading