When we want a donkey to pull a cart, we will usually make the neck of the donkey push the cart by a yoke; we won’t just tie a rope from the cart to the tail of the donkey. The cart must be pulled safely by the whole donkey, not just by its tail.

According to sanskrit grammarians, there is a similar rule about compound words. A descriptive word may be pulled by a whole compound, but not just to the first part of it.

As for instance, we can call a zeppelin a sky-swimmer because it swims in the sky, or we can call a high building a sky-scraper because it scrapes the sky, as it were.

But if we say a “blue sky-swimmer”, that should mean a skyswimmer that is painted blue; it should not mean something that swims in blue-sky only. In other words the descriptive word “blue” should describe the whole compound “sky-swimmer”, not just the tail “sky”.

This rule makes a lot of sense in English. It even makes more sense in sanskrit, because the sanskrit word for “blue” and the word for “swimmer” should be yoked together by their endings. And as the word “blue” has no ending and is linked to the word “swimmer” by the compounding, it cannot link to anything else.

That’s why the grammarians made the donkeytail rule:

when you mean someting that swims the blue sky, you MAY say blue-sky-swimmer in one word, or blue-sky’s swimmer in two words, or blue’s sky’s swimmer in three words, but “blue sky-swimmer” is not kosher because the endings are in the wrong place.

Now, TBH, it must be said that the grammarians said lots of sensical things, but they said it because they thought that some good authors were stretching the language a bit too far. And one of those authors is the author of the rAmAyaNa. He does flout the donkeytail rule sometimes.

When a verse says:

sarvalakSaNa-saMpannA nArINAm सर्वलक्षणसंपन्ना नारीणाम्

then according to good grammar, the word nArINAM नारीणां meaning “of women” cannot be hanging form sarvalakSaNa- सर्वलक्षण meaning “all virtues”, therefore the meaning “all virtues of women” should impossible in good sanskrit and the word nArINAm नारीणाम् should be linked to something else.

Nevertheless, I very much suspect that in this case vAlmIki वाल्मीकि did actually mean “all womanly virtues”, because this makes more sense than the alternative.

Another example is the verse tato vAnara-rAjena vairAnukathanaM prati ततो वानरराजेन वैरानुकथनं प्रति. The compound vaira- वैर + anukathanam अनुकथनम् means “enmity-story”, that is the story of the enmity. To be precise it clearly means the story of the feud of sugrIva- सुग्रीव, the brother of vAlin- वालिन्, with vAlin- वालिन् the king of monkeys.

So, according to grammarians, saying vAnara-rAjEna vairAnukathanam वानरराजेन वैरानुकथनम् “feud-story with monkeyking” is incorrect when we mean “the story of his feud with the kind of monkeys”. The correct way of saying that would be vAnara-rAja-vairAnukathanam वानरराजवैरानुकथनम् “monkeyking-feud-story” in one big compound, or vAnara-rAjena वानरराजेन + vairasya वैरस्य + anukathanam अनुकथनम् “story of feud with monkeyking” in three separate words.

So, if we assume that vAlmIki वाल्मीकि is using correct grammar, then the word vAnara-rajEna वानररजेन has to link to the word duHkhitEna दुःखितेन at the very end of the zloka, and the full verse is saying that sugrIva सुग्रीव, the king of monkeys, told rAma the story of a feud. Which is a lie, because sugrIva सुग्रीव was not king of monkeys at the time; vAlin- वालिन् was.

In the other hand, if we assume that vAlmIki means that sugrIva told rAma the story of his enmity with the king of monkeys vAlin वालिन्, which makes sense, then it follows that vAlmIki वाल्मीकि is using bad grammar. But, at least, he’s not lying!

Now an important tip about vAlmIki- वाल्मीकि. He knew the language a lot, but he knew it as a living language: by having heard it, by having used it, and by having heard a lot of poetry. Poets in all languages always stretch the natural bounds of the language as far as that gives a good effect. Grammarians on the other hand always try RESTRICT the natural variability of language to the forms that are simpler and easiest to understand. So we should not wonder why vAlmIki वाल्मीकि did not always heed the rules of grammarians that lived hundreds or thousands of years after himself.

* * *