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Journal of Indian Philosophy (2006) 34: 513 Springer 2006
DOI 10.1007/s10781-005-6045-xKAMALESWAR BHATTACHARYAON THE LANGUAGE OF NAVYA-NY AYA: AN EXPERIMENTWITH PRECISION THROUGH A NATURAL LANGUAGEDaniel Ingalls one of the very few Western Sanskritists ever
interested in Navya-nyaya once wrote:Navya-nyaya is written in the most formidable style of Sanskrit, a style which
seems to delight in technical terms and breathtaking compounds. What holds for
India holds also for the West. The average Englishman cannot pronounce, let alone
understand, a page of the Principia Mathematica.1It may be added that, as the language of symbolic logic was applied
to other disciplines in the West, so was also the language of Navyanyaya in India.But the analogy seems to end here. Ingalls hastened to say:For all the similarities of subject matter and spirit, the structures of symbolic logic
and Navya-nyaya are radically dierent. They dier not only as wholes; the dierence permeates each detail of the architecture.2The explanation for this dierence is not far to seek, and it had
been emphasized by Ingalls himself elsewhere:3 while the new logic
of the West followed the mathematical model, the new logic of India
followed the linguistic model. The latter did not construct an
articial language (kunstliche Sprache), consisting in a system of
symbols, as did the former; instead, fully exploiting the extraordinary
power of abstraction of the Sanskrit language and the acute linguistic
theories developed by the ancient Indian linguists, it created a
language of its own, which is not articial in the strict sense but
which is free from many of the ambiguities of ordinary language a
language which even the best knowers of Sanskrit must learn.Navya-nyaya operates with the natural (Sanskrit) language.
Its variables are expressed by pronouns, as in ordinary language. Its
technical terms, despite their peculiarity, are words of the ordinary1 Ingalls (1968: XVIII).
2 Ibid.3 Ingalls (1954).6language, invested with new meanings. The dierent shades of
meaning it expresses by using the suxes -ka- and -iya- ultimately go
back to the meaning that of possession which is attached to
those suxes in the ordinary language.4 Abbreviations such as
dhumat for dhumavattvat (in vahniman dhumat X has re, because it
has smoke) are explainable by reference to a semantic theory
developed by the ancient linguists.5 Unnatural abstracts such as
gotvatva...