Indian Linguistic Studies: Festschrift in Honor of George Cardona (review)

In 1972, while I was an undergraduate at Yale and had just seriously embarked on a major in linguistics with an interest in Greek and Latin and historical linguistics, I was browsing in the book section of the Yale Co-op when I saw a slender volume on a table with remainders for sale that bore the curious (to me, at that time) title On haplology in Indo-European. The book intrigued me but I had no idea what it was about, even though words from Greek and Latin were clearly to be found here and there on its pages, along with many from Sanskrit as well, and all in all it represented something rather exotic as far as my still linguistically underdeveloped sensibilities were concerned. I bought it—a bargain at only 77 cents(!)—and it was perhaps the first independent purchase of a linguistics book, that is, other than textbooks for classes, that I made, and it was certainly my first book on Indo-European (and the first to treat Sanskrit so thoroughly). The author was George Cardona (sorry about the price, George!) and I have been intrigued and influenced by his work ever since.

It is not just me, as this festschrift volume attests, for it is edited by two of the honorand’s former students, who also contributed papers to the collection, and there are contributions as well by other former students. Mostly, though, the papers are by colleagues from around the world, and all either cite works by Cardona or deal with topics close to his long-standing areas of scholarly interest. Thus taken together these papers are most appropriate as a way of honoring this fine scholar.

Festschrift volumes, such as the one under review here, are generally difficult to review. Clearly something must be said about the honorand but also about the book itself, its contents, its high points, and so on. So let me start with George Cardona himself.

He is one of the leading scholars, if not the leading scholar, in the West and perhaps in the world, on the Indian grammatical tradition and on the great Indian grammarian Pāṇini. In addition, he has contributed significantly to Indo-Iranian, Indo-European, and general historical linguistics. He has published numerous articles in this very journal as well as in such other key venues as Indo-Iranian Journal, Journal of the American Oriental Society, and Studien zur Indologie und Iranistik. Moreover, he has authored six monographs, including the first volume, covering background and providing an introduction, of a planned multi-volume collection—rightly called ‘monumental’ by Jan Houben in his paper in the present volume (203, n. 1)—Pāṇini: His work and its traditions (published first in 1988 and then brought out in a revised and enlarged second edition in 1997). A bibliography in the volume under review offers dramatic support for any claim of Cardona’s stature in the field, as the listing of his oeuvre runs to thirteen pages (xiii–xxv), covering his published works up to 2000 and other works in press at that time.

As for the book itself, it contains twenty-three papers grouped into six thematic clusters: ‘Sanskrit grammatical theory’ (five papers: ‘How names work in grammar’ by James Benson, ‘Some observations on the sthānasambandha’ by E. G. Kahrs, ‘Some later argument on iko yaṇ aci’ by Robert A. Hueckstedt, ‘Exegetics of Sanskrit grammar’ by Saroja Bhate, and ‘Vaiyākaraṇānām. nirvikalpajñānasaṃkalpanā’ by V. B. Bhagwat, appropriately enough, written in Sanskrit¹), ‘Kāraka-studies’ (having to do with the way the grammatical tradition deals with grammatical or thematic relations; four papers: ‘Bhartṛhari’s rule for unexpressed kārakas’ by Brendan S. Gillon, ‘On P. 1.4.1–2: A reconsideration’ by S. D. J...