Pāṇini

Panini redirects here. For other uses, see Panini (disambiguation).

(पाणिनि; IPA ) was an ancient Indian grammarian (traditionally 520–460 BC, but estimates range from the 7th to 4th centuries BC) who lived in Gandhara and is most famous for his Sanskrit grammar, particularly for his formulation of the 3,959 rules of Sanskrit morphology in the grammar known as "the eight chapters". Panini's grammar is conventionally taken to mark the end of the period of Vedic Sanskrit, by definition introducing Classical Sanskrit.

Date

Nothing definite is known about 's life, not even the century he lived in (he lived almost certainly after the 7th and before the 3rd century BC). According to tradition, he was born in Shalatula, near the Indus river, in Gandhara (now in Pakistan), and lived circa 520–460 BC. His grammar defines Classical Sanskrit, so that per definition lived at the end of the Vedic period: he notes a few special rules, marked ("in the hymns") to account for forms in the Vedic scriptures that had fallen out of use in the spoken language of his time, indicating that Vedic Sanskrit was already archaic, but still a comprehensible dialect.

An important hint for the dating of is the occurrence of the word (in 4.1.49, either "Greek woman", or "Greek script"). There would have been no first-hand knowledge of Greeks in Gandhara before the conquests of Alexander the Great in the 330s BC, but it is likely that the name was known via Old Persian yauna, so that may well have lived as early as the time of Darius the Great (ruled 521 BC–485/6 BC).

It is not known whether himself used writing for the composition of his work. Some people argue that a work of such complexity would have been impossible to compile without written notes, while others allow for the possibility that he might have composed it with the help of a group of students whose memories served him as 'notepads'. Writing first appears in India in the form of the script from at least the 5th century BC, so it is also possible that he would have known and used a writing system (although these early instances of writing are from Tamil Nadu, well removed from Gandhara; the presence of writing in North India prior to the 3rd century BC is uncertain).

Work

's grammar of Sanskrit consists of four parts:

Shiva Sutras (phonology)
Ashtadhyayi (morphology)
Dhatupatha (lists classes verbal roots)
Ganapatha (lists classes of primitive nominal stems)

The Shiva Sutras are a brief but highly organized list of phonemes. The Dhatupatha and Ganapatha are lexical lists, the former of verbal roots sorted by present class, the latter a list of nominal stems grouped by common properties. The central part, and by far the most complex, is the Ashtadhyayi, which takes material from the lexical lists as input and describes algorithms to be applied to them for the generation of well-formed words. It is highly systematised and technical. Inherent in its generative approach are the concepts of the phoneme, the morpheme and the root, only recognized by Western linguists some two millennia later. His rules have a reputation for perfection — that is, they are claimed to describe Sanskrit morphology fully, without any redundancy. A consequence of his grammar's focus on brevity is its highly unintuitive structure, reminiscent of contemporary "machine language" (as opposed to "human readable" programming languages). His sophisticated logical rules and technique have been widely influential in ancient and modern linguistics.

Panini and modern linguistics

, and the later Indian linguist Bhartrihari, may have had a significant influence on many of the foundational ideas proposed by Ferdinand de Saussure, professor of Sanskrit, who is widely considered the father of modern structural linguistics. Noam Chomsky has always acknowledged his debt to for his modern notion of an explicit generative grammar.

uses metarules, transformations, and recursions with such sophistication that his grammar has the computing power equivalent to a Turing machine. In this sense may be considered the father of computing machines. His work was the forerunner to modern formal language theory, and a precursor to computing. Paninian grammars have also been devised for non-Sanskrit languages. The Backus-Naur form (Panini-Backus form) or BNF grammars used to describe modern programming languages have significant similarities to grammar rules.

Panini's vocabulary

While 's work is purely grammatical and lexicographic, cultural and geographical inferences can be drawn from the vocabulary he uses in examples, and from his references to fellow grammarians.

Deities referred to in his work include Vasudeva (4.3.98). The concept of Dharma is attested in his example sentence (4.4.41) "he observes the law".

References

}} 2002.
T.R.N. Rao. Panini-backus form of languages. 1998.
Sheila Bal. The Influence of Panini on Indian Culture.

External links

's Ashtadhyayi in ITRANSliteration and devanagari script
Software based on 's Sanskrit Grammar
Indian Logic and Ontology. A Survey of Contemporary Studies
Traditional Knowledge Systems

Sanskrit grammarians | Ancient mathematicians | Indian mathematicians | Articles containing IAST