George Cardona

American linguist, indologist

George Cardona (/k//ɑːr/'/d//oʊ//n//ə/; born June 3, 1936) is an American linguist, Indologist, Sanskritist, and scholar of Pāṇini. Described as "a luminary" in Indo European, Indo Aryan, and Pāṇinian linguistics since the early sixties, Cardona has been recognized as the leading Western scholar of the Indian grammatical tradition (vyākaraṇa) and of the great Indian grammarian Pāṇini. He is currently Professor Emeritus of Linguistics and South Asian Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Cardona was credited by Mohammad Hamid Ansari, the vice president of India, for making the University of Pennsylvania a "center of Sanskrit learning in North America", along with Professors W. Norman Brown, Ludo Rocher, Ernest Bender, Wilhelm Halbfass, and several other Sanskritists.

George Cardona was born in New York City on June 3, 1936. Cardona's PhD was in linguistics with a specialization in Indo European ‒ by this time he had already begun studying Sanskrit grammar (vyākaraṇa) and related areas (especially nyāya and mīmāṃsā). While in India, Cardona studied under the tutelage of native Indian gurus, is dedicated), Ambika Prasad Upadhyaya, K. S. Krishnamurti Shastri, and Raghunatha Sharma. There, his earlier work in Indo European studies at Yale slowly gave way to work primarily in Indo Iranian and Indo Aryan. His work on Indian grammar gained steam after his exposition of the Ṥivasūtras in 1969. ), which eventually culminated in his Pāṇini: His Work and Its Traditions in 1988, a current work in progress projected to be eight volumes.

He has been formally recognized for his achievements numerous times: he was granted The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship while working on his PhD; in 1971 72, he was admitted as a fellow of the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences, Palo Alto; was selected as the Collitz Professor at the Summer Institute of the Linguistic Society of America at the University of Illinois (1978); was elected in 1984 and 1997 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, respectively; and served as President of the American Oriental Society from 1989 to 1990. native Indian tradition itself, in order to accomplish overtly historical and comparative objectives. Another issue in Indology is the translation of Indian grammatical treatises. Cardona's take on this matter underscores the inevitable inadequacy ‒ indeed, the "useless[ness]" ‒ of translation. Staal offers an even more critical review: he argues, first of all, that Cardona's explication of the śivasūtras is not especially imbued with originality. Nonetheless, Staal credits Cardona for a more explicit formulation of Pāṇinian economy. This explicit formulation, according to Staal, gets across the idea that Pāṇini engaged in the practice of abbreviation not for the sake of brevity for its own sake, but rather conceived of descriptive abbreviation as an instrument of mediating between sāmānya 'the general' and viśeṣa 'the particular'. and Barend Faddegon (1936) were well aware that Pāṇinian methodology exercised abbreviation for the sake of insinuating functionality into and expressing generalization in grammatical treatment. Furthermore, Cardona seems to think that Whitney's assumptions inescapably tainted his methodology, hence the disagreement between Staal and Cardona, and 2) as a resource for linguists in Indic studies (Durbin claims this work would actually be more useful for the amateur needing a general grammatical overview of an Indo Aryan language). In particular, he heavily criticizes Cardona's "disturbing" As far as the "substance" of the volume goes, Szemerényi starts straight away by singling out Cardona's dictum that "haplology is not essentially separable from regular sound change amenable to formulation in terms of what are called sound laws". The majority of the review goes on to criticize this thesis as untenable because of its insensitivity to an essential difference from whom Cardona carried over the idea) that haplology, in relation to these forms, is a regular sound change. Cardona's attempts to maintain that Latin forms like dixti are instances of haplology as regular sound change Bhattacharya, wary of criticizing Cardona on matters relating to Pāṇini because of Cardona's distinguished authority, also notes several of Cardona's departures from conventional analyses. This includes, for instance, Cardona's deliberate commitment to the Indian commentarial tradition in its analysis of accent derivation.

Cardona's legacy is most felt in the discipline of Indian linguistics where he has exemplified ‒ indeed, championed ‒ an approach that seeks to describe and appreciate the techniques of the Indian grammarians. To an extent, Cardona may be characterized as 'historical' and 'philological' in his methodology. However, Cardona has concerned himself with the textual and historically explanatory aims of these approaches ‒ which were, in fact, the goals of earlier philological indology ‒ only insofar as they have enabled him to recover and uncover the linguistic science itself encoded in texts like Pāṇini's Aṣṭādhyāyī. In other words, textual analysis and historical explanation are incidental to Cardona's central priority to treat Pāṇini as an Indian linguist. As fidelity to the tradition figures prominently for Cardona, he has been mostly critical of attempts to compare Pāṇini and the Pāṇinīyas with modern Western grammatical notions. This stance, moreover, has served as a wellspring for debate, most notably with J. F. Staal and Paul Kiparsky. Along these lines, Brian Joseph's depiction of Cardona as a "luminary" in Pāṇinian linguistics warrants an assessment of Cardona as a veritable Pāṇinīya, carrying on the age old exegetical tradition of Pāṇini's Aṣṭādhyāyī.

Staal, J. F. 1970 Studies in Indian grammarians, I: The method of description reflected in the śivasūtras (review). Language 46: 2, part 1, pp. 502–507. Haag, Pascale. Madhav M. Deshpande et Peter E. Hook (éd.) : Indian Linguistic Studies. Festschrift in Honor of George Cardona. In: Bulletin de l'École Française d'Extrême Orient. Tome 90 91, 2003. pp. 504–509.