The Science of Phonetics - शिक्षा वेदाङ्ग (Śikṣā Vedāṅga)
How Indians Used Humans for Data Preservation and Transmission Using Just Sound
एतत् लेखं संस्कृतभाषायाम् अपि लेखितुं शक्नोमि स्म परन्तु दुर्भाग्यवशः न्यूनाः जनाः पठितुं शक्यन्ते अतः आङ्ग्लभाषायाम् लिखितवान् अतः कृपया क्षम्यताम् ।
In this piece, I’m going to put on my analytics hat and assess some things from a modern perspective. Human beings have been recording data in several formats since the dawn of time. A lot of this is in the form of unstructured data sets which could be like the cave paintings of Bhimbhetka that can go back somewhere between 10K-30K years ago.
Besides this there’s the stories passed down from generations over thousands of years, there are songs and several other ways where the information was codified prior to the advent of writing.
The Vedas were passed down using this tradition of verbal transfer from guru to śiṣya. But, there’s so much noise in this type of knowledge transfer that just a simple game of telephone demonstrates that even one sentence can’t be preserved properly.
But, here they had to preserve a huge corpus of material.
The one thing to remember is that data is not the same as its interpretation. There can be several layers of interpretations which are “business rules” applied on top of these data sets. Bhāratiya Darśana Śāstras provide multiple interpretations with several parameters including which type of Pramāṇas (Evidences), their classifications and sub-classifications which are accepted by a particular darśana like multiple lens filters on that data.
More on darśanas in another piece because we first need to preserve these data sets over a long period of time.
So, they came up with an ingenious method of mixing mnemonic devices with rituals to ensure minimal corruption of data when it is transferred from guru to śiṣya. This is one of the reasons why learning Vedic rituals requires पात्रता (pātratā) which loosely means ‘worthiness’ and the student to engage in severe austerities. It was an ingenious method of transfer of data over a vast network of students and a vast corpus of time. Several other divisions were also made to enable this transmission such as vertical slices of the treatises itself. It was difficult to qualify because you would need to have excellent pronunciation, memory and discipline. Your genetics were not a determining factor here for any idiots who use the fake term brāhminism, but you would certainly get an advantage as a jāti brāhmin in the selection process in the same way armed forces kids have an advantage in the selection process because of their constant exposure to that particular life; or a doctors child has an advantage over others when trying to become a doctor. While there are several proofs of this, there’s also several interesting stories such as that of Satyakām Jābāl from the Chāndogya Upaniṣad who became a student of Ṛśi Gautama despite being the son of a prostitute and not knowing who his father was. Haridruma Gautama accepted him because of his and his mothers honesty and his deep desire for knowledge.
A brāhmin jāti child if deaf and/or mute, or without good pronunciation capabilities also wouldn’t qualify as he/she wouldn’t be able to pronounce and transmit this knowledge. This doesn’t means the parents wouldn’t have affection for the child. Anyway, this is a very large topic and has been corrupted beyond imagination for political gains by promoting divisions in society and is a large topic.
For now, here’s a sampler of British records prior to the forced implementation of the Prussian education system in India after 1835.
Ok, let’s get back on topic after that digression.
So, how was this data preserved when there was just the earth and slates to write on? The student had to learn 6 Vedāṇgas before learning the Vedas namely
Śikṣa - Phonetic sound and sound combinations
Vyakaraṇa - Grammar
Chandas - Metre (uses binaries of laghu and guru combinations)
Nirukta - Etymology (How words became what they were)
Kalpa - Ritual
Jyotisha - Astronomy
While all of these contribute to data preservation on transfer, it started with the first Vedāṇga which is Śikṣā. This can also be called the science of human sound and it’s use for data preservation. While everyone knows about the scientific nature of the Sanskrit Akṣaramālā with origins of the sounds starting from guttural sounds (kanṭhavya) emanating from the throat all the way to the Labials (oṣṭhavya) and beyond, there’s far more to sound classification when Vedic literature is preserved.
While classical Sanskrit only uses a subset of these sounds, Vedic Sanskrit relies on a mastery of these. Something as simple as the first vowel or अ actually has 18 potential sound combinations in the following permutations.
3 metrical combinations of ह्रस्व (hrasva) or short, दीर्घ (dīrgha) or long, and प्लुत (pluta) or extended.
3 Pitch combinations of उदात्त (udātta) or upper pitch, अनुदात्त (anudātta) or lower pitch, and स्वरित (svarita) or normal pitch.
2 Nasal combinations as in अनुनासिक (anunāsika) or nasal and अननुनासिक (ananunāsika) or regular non-nasal.
This gives you a 3 x 3 x 2 combination which are 18 sounds.
This is essentially what forms the elementary building blocks of the sounds. There are several sound combinations and combined with rituals and several other mnemonic devices has resulted in us even today having access to this data after several millennia.
With new discoveries in sciences such as the ability to observe subterranean paleo-channels of dried up rivers, paleo-botany of plants of the period, genetics and other hard sciences allow us to map this knowledge to far more accurate time periods using today’s technology and the lens of science especially to the raw data available.
Just like I said in my previous article on elementary numbers, a society would take a lot of time to advance to the point of organizing all of this information, cataloguing it, developing devices to preserve and transmit it and more with no (or unbelievably low) margin of error.
To illustrate the value of the memory of this data , let's go back a few thousand years in time (at least).
One of the oldest known works in the world is the collection of 10 books by the name of the Ṛg Veda. But, before it was put on a written record, it was passed down from one person to another in an oral tradition via memorization. Because, it had to be kept pristine, several mnemonic devices were used. In total, it contains over 10,000 verses. The humans who memorized this were the walking-talking databases of the time. Till today, because of these mnemonic devices, there is a potential error in only 3 places in this entire work. By some estimates, this work could be over 10,000 years old but written records only go back a few thousand years.
The interesting aspect though is the descriptions of the rivers, astronomical records, geography etc found within it. As modern science has caught up with satellite images of subterranean layers of the earth to discover hydro-morphology of rivers via their paleo-channels, archaeo-astronomy descriptions of stars and constellations, paleo-botany, genetics and other sciences can now corroborate what was in that data and establish that a grand river by the name of Saraswati used to flow in a certain geography.
Just because the data existed and was preserved, it could be corroborated by new emerging technologies. If the data had not been kept as a memory, the sciences would still discover these things, but would not have anything to tie it too. There would be no ability to enrich existing information with new findings or corroborate available information.
This is an extremely significant discovery in history, anthropology, and several theories of human migrations and settlements and tells us a lot about ourselves, our history, our ancestors and the civilizational roots they came from.
The value of keeping data sometimes can take time to realize. In the example above, it took thousands of years.
What is incredible is a group of people decided to codify it and transmit all of this information over a very long period of time and did so with tremendous success. The only reason so much is preserved over such a long period of time is tradition.
The least we can do today is have some respect for the tradition that maintained the longest consistent data transfer without errors in history that potentially spans several millennia.
Very informative article
Hearty appreciation for the research and presentation.🙏