Yāska
A figure from the books
#Yaska
Yāska · c. 6th–5th century BCE
In the books · 1 chapter
Who this is
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.
“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.”
The big idea, in the book's words:
“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.”
From the book
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