On the Generalizability of Panini's Pratyahara-Technique to Other Languages

Pān. ini defines the sound classes involved in grammatical rules by pratyāhāras, i.e., a two-letter code based on the order of the sounds in the Śivasūtras. In the present paper we demonstrate that Pān. ini’s pratyāhāra method is generalizable to the description of the phonological systems of other languages by applying it to the sound classes and phonological alternations of German. Furthermore, we compare Pān. ini’s pratyāhāra technique with the technique of describing phonological classes by phonological features, which is more common in Western phonology. It turns out that pratyāhāras perform better than features for the description of our sample of German phonological processes if one considers the quality criterion for class-description devices proposed by Kornai (1993) which is based on the ratio of describable to actual classes.