Incompleteness

Source: TW

Pāṇini’s rules alone are not capable of generating every desired form in the language. That is simply a fact.

jnApaka-fix

For example, “or guṇaḥ” (6.4.146) mandates guṇa of “ū” of Svayambhū́- when it precedes the suffix áṆ. This guṇa blocks uvaṄ-ādeśa (by aci śnu-dhātu-bhruvāṃ yvor iyaṅ-uvaṅau) and results in the undesired form *Svāyambhavá- rather than the desired form Svāyambhuvá-.

This oversight by Pāṇini is taken as a jñāpaka for the paribhāṣā “āgama-śāstram anityam” by later grammarians.

However, this oversight cannot be taken to imply that the form *Svāyambhavá existed in the form of Sanskrit known to Pāṇini. It simply implies that Pāṇini too was human & happened to overlook certain features of the language (the existence of additional vārttikas implicitly acknowledges this).

vArtika fix

Even the popular name of Pāṇini’s Śabdānuśāsanam, i.e. Aṣṭādhyāyī́, can only be derived through Kātyāyana’s vārttika akārāntottarapado dviguḥ striyām iṣṭaḥ.

Pāṇini’s rule “sa napuṃsakam” (2.4.17) would otherwise mandate the neuter rather than the feminine, resulting in the undesirable form *Aṣṭādhyāyám.

Pāṇini’s goal

Moreover, Pāṇini’s primary goal was never to exhaustively catalogue every form that existed in every Vedic dialect, register, & textual tradition. In probabilistic terms, a gap in the grammar could just as easily result from human oversight, linguistic parsimony (i.e. reluctance to “swell” the treatise), etc. as opposed to absence in the spoken language.

Etymological errors

The etymologies provided by Yāska and Pāṇini are indeed incorrect at times (e.g. nápāt clearly has no eymological connection to the negative particle ná, yet Pāṇini treats it as such in 6.3.75); however, it’s important to note that hermeneutic validity is distinct from generative comprehensiveness.

Approximation for cikitvít

For example, according per Pāṇini’s grammar, the nominative forms of cikitvás- are cikitvā́n (masc.), cikitúṣī (fem.) and cikitvát (neu.).

Yet in the Vedas we do not encounter the form cikitvát; rather, we encounter the form cikitvít:

yāvayád-dveṣasaṃ tvā cikitvít sūnṛtāvari práti stómair abhutsmahi RV 4.52.4

cikitvín-manasaṃ tvā deváṃ mártāsa ūtáye váreṇyasya té ‘vāsaḥ iyānā́so amanmahi RV 5.22.3

It is possible that cikitvít is a variant of cikitvát (cf. dhṛṣitā́ for dhṛṣatā́ in dhṛṣitā́pibat), though others have tied the -ít in cikitvít to the -ít suffix in pradakṣiṇít.

In any case, we do not need to formally generate the exact form in order to interpret the meaning.

Chronometer confusion

Bronkhorst seeks to flip this logic on its head by treating the Aṣṭādhyāyī as a historical “chronometer.”

He then uses this chronometric model to argue that Yājñavalkyakāṇḍa of the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad postdates Pāṇini and that other sections of the Upaniṣad may even postdate Kātyāyana and Patañjali; however, this is a fringe view in academia.