- Lived:
- somewhere between roughly 700 and 500 BCE — no consensus exists; certainly after Śākalya, whom he cites, and before Pāṇini's grammar was standard. Birthplace unknown; his one accidental self-portrait is a survey of Sanskrit dialects stretching from the Kamboja lands of the far north-west to the eastern provinces
- Field:
- language — etymology and semantics; author of the Nirukta, the oldest surviving Indian work on what words mean and where they come from, and one of the first people anywhere to sort human speech into parts
- The Big Idea:
- A perfectly memorized text that nobody understands is not preserved — it is embalmed. Meaning can be recovered, word by word, by asking of each word what action it comes from; and the fact that a text is hard is the reader's problem to solve, not the text's fault.
- In their words:
- "It is not the fault of the post that the blind man does not see it: the fault lies with the man." (Nirukta 1.16, answering the sceptic Kautsa; the rendering is ours — Lakshman Sarup's 1920s translation runs close)
- If you remember one thing:
- When a sceptic argued that the Vedic hymns were meaningless sound — and argued it well — Yāska wrote the world's first surviving book of etymology to prove that the old words still meant something, and was honest enough to record his opponents' best arguments inside his own book, where they have outlived everything else those opponents ever said.