(, ; "bursting, opening", "spurt") is an important concept in the Indian grammatical tradition of Vyakarana, relating to the problem of speech production, how the mind orders linguistic units into coherent discourse and meaning.
The theory of ' is associated with Bhartá¹Âhari ( 5th century), an early figure in Indic linguistic theory, mentioned in the 670s by Chinese traveller Yijing. Bhartá¹Âhari is the author of the VÃÂkyapadëya ("[treatise] on words and sentences"). The work is divided into three books, the Brahma-kÃÂá¹Âá¸Âa, (or ÃÂgama-samuccaya "aggregation of traditions"), the VÃÂkya-kÃÂá¹Âá¸Âa, and the Pada-kÃÂá¹Âá¸Âa (or Prakërá¹Âaka "miscellaneous").
He theorized the act of speech as being made up of three stages:
is of the ' "speech monistic" school which identifies language and cognition. According to George Cardona, "VÃÂkyapadëya is considered to be the major Indian work of its time on grammar, semantics and philosophy."
While the ' theory proper (') originates with , the term has a longer history of use in the technical vocabulary of Sanskrit grammarians, and Bhartá¹Âhari may have been building on the ideas of his predecessors, whose works are partly lost.
Sanskrit ' is etymologically derived from the root ' 'to burst'. It is used in its technical linguistic sense by Patañjali (2nd century BCE), in reference to the "bursting forth" of meaning or idea on the mind as language is uttered. Patañjali's sphoá¹Âa is the invariant quality of speech. The acoustic element (dhvani) can be long or short, loud or soft, but the sphoá¹Âa remains unaffected by individual speaker differences. Thus, a single phoneme (vará¹Âa) such as /k/, /p/ or /a/ is an abstraction, distinct from variants produced in actual enunciation. Eternal qualities in language are already postulated by YÃÂska, in his Nirukta (1.1), where reference is made to another ancient grammarian, ', about whose work nothing is known, but who has been suggested as the original source of the concept. The grammarian VyÃÂá¸Âi, author of the lost text Saá¹Âgraha, may have developed some ideas in sphoá¹Âa theory; in particular some distinctions relevant to dhvani are referred to by Bhartá¹Âhari.
There is no use of ' as a technical term prior to Patañjali, but PÃÂá¹Âini (6.1.123) refers to a grammarian named ' as one of his predecessors. This has induced PÃÂá¹Âini's medieval commentators (such as Haradatta) to ascribe the first development of the ' to '.
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The account of the Chinese traveller Yijing places a firm terminus ante quem of AD 670 on Bhartá¹Âhari. Scholarly opinion had formerly tended to place him in the 6th or 7th century; current consensus places him in the 5th century. By some traditional accounts, he is the same as the poet Bhartá¹Âhari who wrote the à Âatakatraya.
In the , the term sphoá¹Âa takes on a finer nuance, but there is some dissension among scholars as to what Bhartá¹Âhari intended to say. Sphoá¹Âa retains its invariant attribute, but sometimes its indivisibility is emphasized and at other times it is said to operate at several levels. In verse I.93, Bhartá¹Âhari states that the sphota is the universal or linguistic typeâÂÂsentence-type or word-type, as opposed to their tokens (sounds).
Bhartá¹Âhari develops this doctrine in a metaphysical setting, where he views sphoá¹Âa as the language capability of man, revealing his consciousness. Indeed, the ultimate reality is also expressible in language, the à Âabda-brahman, or "Eternal Verbum". Early Indologists such as A. B. Keith felt that Bhartá¹Âhari's sphoá¹Âa was a mystical notion, owing to the metaphysical underpinning of Bhartá¹Âhari's text, VÃÂkyapÃÂdiya, where it is discussed. Also, the notion of "flash or insight" or "revelation" central to the concept also lent itself to this viewpoint. However, the modern view is that it is perhaps a more psychological distinction.
Bhartá¹Âhari expands on the notion of sphoá¹Âa in Patañjali, and discusses three levels:
He makes a distinction between sphoá¹Âa, which is whole and indivisible, and nÃÂda, the sound, which is sequenced and therefore divisible. The sphoá¹Âa is the causal root, the intention, behind an utterance, in which sense is similar to the notion of lemma in most psycholinguistic theories of speech production. However, sphoá¹Âa arises also in the listener, which is different from the lemma position. Uttering the nÃÂda induces the same mental state or sphoá¹Âa in the listener - it comes as a whole, in a flash of recognition or intuition (pratibhÃÂ, 'shining forth'). This is particularly true for vakya-sphoá¹Âa, where the entire sentence is thought of (by the speaker), and grasped (by the listener) as a whole.
Bimal K. Matilal (1990) has tried to unify these views - he feels that for Bhartá¹Âhari the very process of thinking involves vibrations, so that thought has some sound-like properties. Thought operates by à Âabdana or 'speaking', - so that the mechanisms of thought are the same as that of language. Indeed, Bhartá¹Âhari seems to be saying that thought is not possible without language. This leads to a somewhat whorfian position on the relationship between language and thought. The sphoá¹Âa then is the carrier of this thought, as a primordial vibration.
Sometimes the nÃÂda-sphoá¹Âa distinction is posited in terms of the signifier-signified mapping, but this is a misconception. In traditional Sanskrit linguistic discourse (e.g. in KatyÃÂyana), vÃÂcaka refers to the signifier, and 'vÃÂcya' the signified. The 'vÃÂcaka-vÃÂcya' relation is eternal for KatyÃÂyana and the MëmÃÂá¹Âsakas, but is conventional among the NyÃÂya. However, in Bhartá¹Âhari, this duality is given up in favour of a more holistic view - for him, there is no independent meaning or signified; the meaning is inherent in the word or the sphoá¹Âa itself.
Sphoá¹Âa theory remained widely influential in Indian philosophy of language and was the focus of much debate over several centuries. It was adopted by most scholars of VyÃÂkaraá¹Âa (grammar), but both the MëmÃÂá¹Âsàand NyÃÂya schools rejected it, primarily on the grounds of compositionality. Adherents of the 'sphota' doctrine were holistic or non-compositional (a-khaná¸Âa-paká¹£a), suggesting that many larger units of language are understood as a whole, whereas the MëmÃÂá¹Âsakas in particular proposed compositionality (khaná¸Âa-paká¹£a). According to the former, word meanings, if any, are arrived at after analyzing the sentences in which they occur. This debate had many of the features animating present day debates in language over semantic holism, for example.
The MëmÃÂá¹Âsakas felt that the sound-units or the letters alone make up the word. The sound-units are uttered in sequence, but each leaves behind an impression, and the meaning is grasped only when the last unit is uttered. The position was most ably stated by Kumarila Bhatta (7th century) who argued that the 'sphoá¹Âas' at the word and sentence level are after all composed of the smaller units, and cannot be different from their combination. However, in the end it is cognized as a whole, and this leads to the misperception of the sphoá¹Âa as a single indivisible unit. Each sound unit in the utterance is an eternal, and the actual sounds differ owing to differences in manifestation.
The NyÃÂya view is enunciated among others by Jayanta (9th century), who argues against the MëmÃÂá¹Âsàposition by saying that the sound units as uttered are different; e.g. for the sound [g], we infer its 'g-hood' based on its similarity to other such sounds, and not because of any underlying eternal. Also, the vÃÂcaka-vÃÂcya linkage is viewed as arbitrary and conventional, and not eternal. However, he agrees with Kumarila in terms of the compositionality of an utterance.
Throughout the second millennium, a number of treatises discussed the sphoá¹Âa doctrine. Particularly notable is Nageà Âabhaá¹Âá¹Âa's SphotavÃÂda (18th century). Nageà Âa clearly defines sphoá¹Âa as a carrier of meaning, and identifies eight levels, some of which are divisible.
In modern times, scholars of Bhartá¹Âhari have included Ferdinand de Saussure, who did his doctoral work on the genitive in Sanskrit and lectured on Sanskrit and Indo-European languages at the Paris and at the University of Geneva for nearly three decades. It is thought that he might have been influenced by some ideas of Bhartá¹Âhari, particularly the sphoá¹Âa debate. In particular, his description of the sign, as composed of the signifier and the signified, where these entities are not separableâÂÂthe whole mapping from sound to denotation constitutes the signâÂÂseems to have some colourings of sphoá¹Âa in it. Many other prominent European scholars around 1900, including linguists such as Leonard Bloomfield and Roman Jakobson, were influenced by Bhartá¹Âhari.