Subjecthood in Pāṇini’s grammatical tradition

According to the common opinion, there is no place for the grammatical category of subject in Pāṇini’s grammar of Sanskrit. This is due to the fact that, according to many scholars of Pāṇini, Sanskrit lacks this category in its grammar. However, if we take into consideration a wider view of what Pāṇini’s grammar is and what language it presupposes, we can conclude that speaking of subject becomes more sensible, especially if we take into account some subjecthood features that so far have not been used in this respect. I conclude that, if not Pāṇini himself, some later commentators could have had a notion very similar to subject in their linguistic background, which induced them to interpret Pāṇini’s theories so that the idea of subjecthood eventually surfaced

Meaningfulness, the unsaid and translatability. Instead of an introduction

The present paper opens this topical issue on translation techniques by drawing a theoretical basis for the discussion of translational issues in a linguistic perspective. In order to forward an audience- oriented definition of translation, I will describe different forms of linguistic variability, highlighting how they present different difficulties to translators, with an emphasis on the semantic and communicative complexity that a source text can exhibit. The problem is then further discussed through a comparison between Quine's radically holistic position and the translatability principle supported by such semanticists as Katz. General translatability — at the expense of additional complexity — is eventually proposed as a possible synthesis of this debate. In describing the meaningfulness levels of source texts through Hjelmslevian semiotics, and his semiotic hierarchy in particular, the paper attempts to go beyond denotative semiotic, and reframe some translational issues in a connotative semiotic and metasemiotic perspective

Characteribus belgicis: alcuni aspetti della ricezione del gotico nell’umanesimo fiammingo e olandese

The paper presents the history of reception of the Codex Argenteus, from its discovery until the first printed edition in 1665, with a special reference to the Gothicism debate. Three aspects are taken into consideration: the idea of the Gothic Bible as a historical antecedent of the Protestant vernacular translations of the Bible; the myth of linguistic similarity between Gothic and Low German varieties, especially Frisian; and the ideology of the typographic rendering of the Gothic texts: an explanation for B. Vulcanius’ mention of “Belgian letters” is proposed

Understanding a philosophical text. The problem of “meaning” in Jayanta’s Nyāyamañjarī, Book 5

The authors make an attempt to comparatively analyse some stances of the Old Indian philosophy of language, exemplified by the Medieval Indian author Jayanta, along with the Western tradition of the analytical philosophy of language, and to highlight the differences as well as the similarities

The adventures of Pāṇini’s grammar in China and Japan: the case of the kāraka/vibhakti system

In this article we deal with the translation and reinterpretation of the Indian indigenous theory of grammatical case in China and Japan. After a brief survey of the kāraka/vibhakti system as it appears in Pāṇini’s Aṣṭādhyāyī, the earliest Chinese accounts on this topic are presented. We argue that this refined theoretical achievement of Pāṇini’s was not entirely understood in East Asia. We mainly focus on the accounts of the Indian case theory by two Chinese monks, Xuánzàng and Kuījī. We hypothesize that the eight cases identified by Kuījī go back to some late post-Pāṇinian grammatical tradition. Concerning the Japanese treatment of kārakas, we focus on the fact that a modified version of this same theory was applied to the Japanese verbal inflection, thus showing a total reinvention of this Sanskrit grammatical category via Chinese mediation and some original innovations performed by the Japanese Buddhist scholars

Morphosyntactic isoglosses in Indo-European: an introduction

Editorial introduction to the Special Issue focused on the morphosyntactic isoglosses in Indo-European

Translation Techniques in the Ancient and Oriental Cultures

The papers collected in this monographical issue of the journal "Open Linguistics" analyze the peculiarities of translation techniques adopted by translators who worked within a variety of pre-modern environments (Ancient Europe, Mesopotamia, South Asia, Buddhist and Central Asia, Eastern Asia). The major focus is on translation practices when no translation theory was available. The ultimate goal is to understand whether we can infer any kind of implicit, yet systematic, theoretical attitude from the analysis of the translation techniques implemented in these milieus

Yūto Kawamura, The kāraka theory embodied in the Rāma story. A Sanskrit textbook in Medieval India

The book by Y. Kawamura is critically reviewed