George Cardona (; born June 3, 1936) is an American linguist, Indologist, Sanskritist, and scholar of Pāṇini. Described as "a luminary" in Indo-European, Indo-Aryan, and Pāṇinian linguistics since the early sixties, Cardona has been recognized as the leading Western scholar of the Indian grammatical tradition (vyākaraṇa) and of the great Indian grammarian Pāṇini. He is currently professor emeritus of Linguistics and South Asian Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Cardona was credited by Mohammad Hamid Ansari, the vice president of India, for making the University of Pennsylvania a "center of Sanskrit learning in North America", along with Professors W. Norman Brown, Ludo Rocher, Ernest Bender, Wilhelm Halbfass, and several other Sanskritists.
Early life and education George Cardona was born in New York City on June 3, 1936.
Cardona obtained his BA from New York University in 1956, and his MA and PhD degrees from Yale in 1958 and 1960, respectively. His dissertation advisor at Yale was Paul Thieme, who worked primarily in Vedic studies and Sanskrit grammar. Cardona's PhD was in linguistics with a specialization in Indo-European ‒ by this time he had already begun studying Sanskrit grammar (vyākaraṇa) and related areas (especially nyāya and mīmāṃsā).
Career In 1962–63, Cardona went to Gujarat state, India, where he worked on his A Gujarati reference grammar, as well as furthering his understanding of Sanskrit and Indian grammatical tradition. While in India, Cardona studied under the tutelage of native Indian gurus, including Jagannath S. Pade Shastri (his first Indian mentor and to whom his most significant work, Pāṇini: His Work and its Traditions, is dedicated), Ambika Prasad Upadhyaya, K.S. Krishnamurti Shastri, and Raghunatha Sharma.
University of Pennsylvania Cardona taught Hindi and other modern Indic languages at the University of Pennsylvania. There, his earlier work in Indo-European studies at Yale slowly gave way to work primarily in Indo-Iranian and Indo-Aryan. His work on Indian grammar gained steam after his exposition of the Ṥivasūtras in 1969. After this point he directed the majority of his scholarly attention toward further vyākaraṇa scholarship and analysis of various aspects of the Aṣṭādhyāyī (lit. 'eight chapters'), which eventually culminated in his Pāṇini: His Work and Its Traditions in 1988, a current work-in-progress projected to be eight volumes.
Cardona's large body of work and publications have reflected scholarly depth and intensity throughout his professional career.
Achievements and honors He has been formally recognized for his achievements numerous times: he was granted The Woodrow Wilson National FellowshipThe Indo-European thematic aorists. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University Microfilms. 1960. [doctoral dissertation, Yale University] while working on his PhD; in 1971–72, he was admitted as a fellow of the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences, Palo Alto; was selected as the Collitz Professor at the Summer Institute of the Linguistic Society of America at the University of Illinois (1978); was elected in 1984 and 1997 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, respectively; and served as President of the American Oriental Society from 1989 to 1990. He is also known as an authority on Gujarati, for which he has been honored with membership in the Gujarati Sāhitya Pariṣad. And, notably, on November 21, 2016, Cardona was awarded (along with Thai Princess, Maha Chakri Sirindhorn) the World Sanskrit Award from the Indian Council on Cultural Relations.
Research
Background Cardona's career began in the 1950s and '60s as indological studies, especially studies in traditional Sanskrit grammar, burgeoned throughout the United States. Cardona entered the scene of indological studies at the closing of a disciplinary era dominated by the legacies of Bopp, Whitney, and Bloomfield ‒ which triad of thinkers had established a discipline that relied less upon, and on occasion pointedly opposed, native Indian tradition itself, in order to accomplish overtly historical and comparative objectives. Thus the emerging indological discipline of Cardona's early career differentiated itself by rejecting what it saw as the unappreciating and therefore skewed appraisal of Indian tradition by early Western indological tradition (i.e. comparative linguistics and, a bit later, philological indology), instead emphasizing an approach it characterized as historically descriptive interpretation of Indian thinkers and their works ‒ that is, to get at what Indian thinkers "sought to achieve in their writings, and how they went about doing it". The disciplinary orientations of both early and late Western indology remain discernable throughout Cardona's career, as when, in a methodological controversy, J.F. Staal characterizes Cardona as a historically motivated philologist, but identifies himself (Staal) as, above all, a linguist in the tradition of Whitney (with respect to Whitney's methodological approach).
On the whole, Cardona has been widely recognized as a champion of the indology that seeks an interior ‒ if not a simply historical ‒ understanding of the intentions and aims of Indian grammarians. This is evidenced, for instance, by Cardona's sometimes unorthodox commitment to interpreting Indian grammatical treatises in line with the traditional treatment of the munitraya (lit. 'the trio of sages') ‒ Pāṇini, Kātyāyana, and Patañjali. Moreover, concerning his work on the Aṣṭādhyāyī, Cardona has contributed to an ongoing debate as to how the design of Pāṇini's grammar ought to be conceptualized: in terms of modern linguistic insight; the native exegetical tradition; or some fusion of the two. These debates have resulted in much dispute about scholarly orientation toward and treatment of this grammatical treatise ‒ case in point being Cardona's dispute with J.F. Staal and Sergiu Al-George on the relation of Pāṇini to generative formalism (see below).
Cardona has worked alongside a number of other scholars, who have, as a collective, both constituted an intellectual backdrop for Cardona and mutually constructed an interdependent network of collegiate industry with him. These persons include: Rosane Rocher, Barend van Nooten Hartmut Scharfe, J.F. Staal, Paul Kiparsky, Hans Hock, Madhav Deshpande, Rama Nath Sharma, and Peter Scharf.
Perspectives
Indology Indology as a discipline involves textual criticism and exegesis for the purposes of historical and cultural explanation. Cardona's involvement in this field has concerned the analysis and interpretation of ancient Indian grammatical treatises. One puzzle in this sub-field involves the absolute and relative dating of grammatical texts. While scholars of previous generations ‒ such as Albrecht Weber, Bruno Liebich, and Sylvain Lévi ‒ did not shy away from making claims about dating these texts, Cardona summed up the prevailing contemporary sentiment when he concluded: 'non liquet' (Latin for 'it is not clear').
Another issue in Indology is the translation of Indian grammatical treatises. Cardona's take on this matter underscores the inevitable inadequacy ‒ indeed, the "useless[ness]" ‒ of translation. Cardona's reasoning for this derives from the nature of the Aṣṭādhyāyī and other grammatical compositions themselves: especially for the former (which was designed to be memorized), the structure of these texts prioritizes economical exposition and so they read more like a series of mathematical formulas than spoken prose. Following from this, Cardona holds the view that translations often end up "less clear than the original texts."
An additional task of indology is the relating of texts to each other. In fact, Cardona stands out as a dedicated scholar of not only the Aṣṭādhyāyī, but also of all the later daughter commentaries of this cornerstone text.
Indian linguistics As a field, Indian linguistics is concerned with the examination of Indian linguistic methods and inquiry insofar as Indian thinkers have fielded linguistic insight ‒ thus, from a conventional standpoint, the fact that these linguistic methods have to do with India is incidental. Indian linguistics is Cardona's primary area of activity and expertise. Rocher identified the central concern of this field when she observed (writing in 1975) that Cardona's then in-progress Panini: His Work and Its Traditions (1988, 1997) would "reflect the fact that present day research is essentially [tied up] with methodology."
Pāṇini's Method of Linguistic Description
Meta-terminology and Meta-rules Linguistic description necessarily employs technical and metalinguistic terminology. On this matter, Cardona has defended the view that the immediate context surrounding a term should determine its meaning. This stands in contrast to the perspective held by his direct teacher, Paul Thieme, who argued that technical terms have a "single interpretation" and that their meaning remains consistent across commentaries and grammars. Related to the defining of technical terminology is examining how it operates (in a given text). In his article, Studies in Indian Grammarians, I: The method of description reflected in the śivasūtras, Cardona discusses the metalanguage employed therein and how it accomplishes Pāṇini's methodological aim, namely, economy. In a review of this work, Rocher takes, in fact, as Cardona's chief contribution "the refinement brought to the principle of economy." In other words, what Cardona has accomplished here, Rocher elaborates, is a conscientious investment into and explication of the (intellectual) procedure of generalization as it features within the practice of descriptive economy (of grammar) itself; thus, infers Rocher, the terse concision of the grammarians ought to be the object itself of further study. All in all then, Rocher attributes to Cardona originality insofar as he keeps to the Indian tradition in methodology, which enables Cardona to translate, so to speak, the scholastic vernacular of ancient India into modern Western parlance. Cardona himself concludes, after much elaboration, that his achievement in this paper is to have situated "how the śivasūtras fit into the general method of description followed by Pāṇini", which leads to a related, but distinct insight, namely, that Pāṇini's contribution to the Indian grammatical tradition was primarily methodological, otherwise being quite conservative within his (Pāṇini's) intellectual milieu.
Not all scholars have commended Cardona's The method of description reflected in the śivasūtras. Harald Millonig, for instance, appraises Cardona's study of the śivasūtras as more or less comprehensive, but ultimately deficient in its attention to detail, particularly with regard to the relationships between the text and the pratyāhāra-sūtras. Staal offers an even more critical review: he argues, first of all, that Cardona's explication of the śivasūtras is not especially imbued with originality. Nonetheless, Staal credits Cardona for a more explicit formulation of Pāṇinian economy. This explicit formulation, according to Staal, gets across the idea that Pāṇini engaged in the practice of abbreviation not for the sake of brevity for its own sake, but rather conceived of descriptive abbreviation as an instrument of mediating between sāmānya 'the general' and viśeṣa 'the particular'.