Universal Properties |
Early Grammarians on Universals of Words and Meanings
In ancient India systematic metaphysics started with a linguistic turn. Ontological concepts and controversies arose in the context of musings on meanings of words and debates on declensions, unlike in ancient Greece, where metaphysics arose out of wondering about numbers, figures, and nature.
In Pañini’s grammar and his early commentaries (between the fourth and second centuries BCE) the three crucial technical terms for a universal—samanya, jati, and akrti—were already explicitly in use. Philosophers of language dabbled in metaphysics since Patañjali’s “Great Commentary” to Pañini’s grammar.
The device of adding a tva or ta (roughly equivalent to the English “ness”) to any nominal root x, yields, as meaning, the property of being x. From substance (dravya) one can thus mechanically abstract substanceness (dravya-tva), from real (sat) and reality (satta).