Pāṇini


was an ancient Sanskrit philologist, grammarian, and a revered scholar in ancient India. Considered "the father of linguistics", after the discovery and publication of Pāṇini's work by European scholars in the nineteenth century, his influence on aspects of the development of modern linguists is widely recognized in the profession; his grammar was influential on foundational scholars such as Ferdinand de Saussure and Leonard Bloomfield. Pāṇini likely lived in Shalatula in ancient Gandhara in the northwest Indian subcontinent, during the Mahajanapada era.
Pāṇini is known for his text Aṣṭādhyāyī, a sutra-style treatise on Sanskrit grammar, 3,959 "verses" or rules on linguistics, syntax and semantics in "eight chapters" which is the foundational text of the Vyākaraṇa branch of the Vedanga, the auxiliary scholarly disciplines of the Vedic period. His aphoristic text attracted numerous bhashya, of which Patanjali's Mahābhāṣya is the most famous in Hindu traditions. His ideas influenced and attracted commentaries from scholars of other Indian religions such as Buddhism.
Pāṇini's analysis of noun compounds still forms the basis of modern linguistic theories of compounding in Indian languages. Pāṇini's comprehensive and scientific theory of grammar is conventionally taken to mark the start of Classical Sanskrit. His systematic treatise inspired and made Sanskrit the preeminent Indian language of learning and literature for two millennia.
Pāṇini's theory of morphological analysis was more advanced than any equivalent Western theory before the 20th century. His treatise is generative and descriptive, uses metalanguage and meta-rules, and has been compared to the Turing machine wherein the logical structure of any computing device has been reduced to its essentials using an idealized mathematical model.
The name Pāṇini is a patronymic meaning descendant of. His full name was "Dakṣiputra Pāṇini" according to verses 1.75.13 and 3.251.12 of Patanjali's Mahābhāṣya, with the first part suggesting his mother's name was Dakṣi.

Date and context

Dating

Nothing definite is known about when Pāṇini lived, not even in which century he lived. Pāṇini has been dated between the seventh or sixth and fourth century BCE. Von Hinüber based on numismatic arguments and Falk based on his Indic script studies, place him in mid-fourth century BCE. Others use internal evidence and textual evidence in ancient Indian texts to date him in the sixth or fifth century BCE, while Bod mentions the seventh to fifth century BCE. George Cardona in his survey and review of Pāṇini-related studies, states that the available evidence strongly supports a dating no later than between 400 to 350 BCE, while earlier dating depends on interpretations and is not probative.
According to Bod, Pāṇini's grammar defines Classical Sanskrit, so Pāṇini is chronologically placed in the later part of the Vedic period. According to A. B. Keith, the Sanskrit text that most matches the language described by Pāṇini is the Aitareya Brāhmaṇa. According to Scharfe, "his proximity to the Vedic language as found in the Upanisads and Vedic sutra's suggests the 5th or maybe 6th c. B.C."
Based on numismatic findings, Von Hinüber and Falk place Pāṇini in the mid-4th century BCE. Pāṇini's rupya mentions a specific coin which was introduced in India in the 4th-century BCE. According to Houben, "the date of "ca. 350 B.C.E. for Pāṇini is thus based on concrete evidence which till now has not been refuted." According to Bronkhorst, there is no reason to doubt the validity of Von Hinüber's and Falk's argument, setting the terminus post quem, the earliest time the event may have happened, for the date of Pāṇini at 350 BCE or the decennia thereafter. According to Bronkhorst,
Cardona mentions two major pieces of internal evidence for the dating of Pāṇini. The occurrence of the word Yona| in 4.1.49, referring to a writing c.q. cuneiform writing, or to Greek writing, suggests a date for Pāṇini after Alexander the Great. Cardona rejects this possibility, arguing that may also refer to a Yavana woman; and that Indians had contacts with the Greek world before Alexander's conquests. Sutra 2.1.70 of Pāṇini mentions kumāraśramaṇa, derived from śramaṇa, which refers to a female renunciates, c.q. "Buddhist nuns," implying that Pāṇini should be placed after Gautama Buddha. K. B. Pathak argued that kumāraśramaṇa could also refer to a Jain nun, meaning that Pāṇini is not necessarily to be placed after the Buddha.
It is not certain whether Pāṇini used writing for the composition of his work, though it is generally agreed that he knew of a form of writing, based on references to words such as lipi and lipikara in section 3.2 of the Aṣṭādhyāyī. The dating of the introduction of writing in India may therefore give further information on the dating of Pāṇini.
Pāṇini cites at least ten grammarians and linguists before him. According to Sumitra Mangesh Katre, the ten Vedic scholar names he quotes are of Apisali, Kashyapa, Gargya, Galava, Cakravarmana, Bharadvaja, Sakatayana, Sakalya, Senaka and Sphotayana. According to Kamal K. Misra, Pāṇini also refers to Yaska, "whose writings date back to the middle of the 4th century B.C." Both Brihatkatha and Mañjuśrī-mūla-kalpa mention Pāṇini to have been a contemporary with the Nanda king.

Location

Nothing certain is known about Pāṇini's personal life. According to the Mahābhāṣya of Patanjali, his mother's name was Dākṣī. Patañjali calls Pāṇini Dākṣīputra at several places in the Mahābhāṣya. Rambhadracharya suggests that the name of his father was Paṇina, from which the name Pāṇini could be grammatically derived.
In an inscription of Siladitya VII of Valabhi, he is called Śalāturiya, which means "man from Salatura". This means Panini lived in Salatura of ancient Gandhara, which likely was near Lahor, a town at the junction of Indus and Kabul rivers, which falls in the Swabi District of modern Pakistan. According to the memoirs of 7th-century Chinese scholar Xuanzang, there was a town called Suoluoduluo on the Indus where Pāṇini was born, and he composed the Qingming-lun.
According to Hartmut Scharfe, Pāṇini lived in Gandhara close to the borders of the Achaemenid Empire, and Gandhara was then an Achaemenian satrapy following the Achaemenid conquest of the Indus Valley. He must, therefore, have been technically a Persian subject but his work shows no awareness of the Persian language. In his work the Ashtadhyayi, Pāṇini mentions the Yavanas, thought to be the Greeks. According to Patrick Olivelle, Pāṇini's text and references to him elsewhere suggest that "he was clearly a northerner, probably from the northwestern region".

Legends and later reception

Panini is mentioned in Indian fables and ancient texts. The Panchatantra, for example, mentions that Pāṇini was killed by a lion.
Pāṇini was depicted on a five-rupee Indian postage stamp in August, 2004.

''''

The is the central part of 's grammar, and by far the most complex. The Ashtadhyayi is the oldest linguistic and grammar text of any language and of Sanskrit surviving in its entirety, and Pāṇini refers to older texts and authors such as the Unadisutra, Dhatupatha, and Ganapatha some of which have only survived in part. It complements the Vedic ancillary sciences such as the Niruktas, Nighantus, and Shiksha.
Regarded as extremely compact without sacrificing completeness, it would become the model for later specialist technical texts or sutras.
The text takes material from 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 approach are the concepts of the phoneme, the morpheme and the root. His rules have a reputation for perfection – that is, they tersely describe Sanskrit morphology unambiguously and completely. A consequence of his grammar's focus on brevity is its highly unintuitive structure, reminiscent of modern notations such as the "Backus–Naur form". His sophisticated logical rules and technique have been widely influential in ancient and modern linguistics.
The was not the first description of Sanskrit grammar, but it is the earliest that has survived in full. The became the foundation of Vyākaraṇa, a Vedanga.
In the, language is observed in a manner that has no parallel among Greek or Latin grammarians. Pāṇini's grammar, according to Renou and Filliozat, defines the linguistic expression and a classic that set the standard for Sanskrit language. Pāṇini made use of a technical metalanguage consisting of a syntax, morphology, and lexicon. This metalanguage is organised according to a series of meta-rules, some of which are explicitly stated while others can be deduced.
The consists of 3,959 sutras or "aphoristic threads" in eight chapters, which are each subdivided into four sections or padas. This text attracted a famous and one of the most ancient Bhasya called the Mahabhasya. The author of Mahabhasya is named Patanjali, who may or may not be the same person as the one who authored Yogasutras. The Mahabhasya, literally "great commentary", is more than a commentary on Ashtadhyayi. It is the earliest known philosophical text of the Hindu Grammarians. Non-Hindu texts and traditions on grammar emerged after Patanjali, some of which include the Sanskrit grammar text of Jainendra of Jainism and the Chandra school of Buddhism.

Rules

The first two sutras are as follows:
In these sutras, the letters which here are put into the upper case actually are special meta-linguistic symbols; they are called IT markers or, by later writers such as Katyayana and Patanjali, anubandhas. The C and Ṅ refer to Shiva Sutras 4 and 3, respectively, forming what are known as the pratyāhāras "comprehensive designations" aiC, eṄ. They denote the list of phonemes and respectively. The त् appearing in both sutras is also an IT marker: Sutra 1.1.70 defines it as indicating that the preceding phoneme does not represent a list, but a single phoneme, encompassing all supra-segmental features such as accent and nasality. For further example, आत् and अत् represent आ and अ respectively.
When a sutra defines a technical term, the term defined comes at the end, so the first sutra should have properly been ādaiJ vṛddhir instead of vṛddhir ādaiC. However the order is reversed to have a good-luck word at the very beginning of the work; vṛddhir happens to mean 'prosperity' in its non-technical use.
Thus the two sūtras consist of a list of phonemes, followed by a technical term; the final interpretation of the two sūtras above is thus:
At this point, one can see they are definitions of terminology: guṇa and vṛ́ddhi are the terms for the full and the lengthened Indo-European ablaut grades, respectively.

List of IT markers

its or anubandhas are defined in P. 1.3.2 through P. 1.3.8. These definitions refer only to items taught in the grammar or its ancillary texts such at the '; this fact is made clear in P. 1.3.2 by the word upadeśe, which is then continued in the following six rules by ', Ellipsis. As these anubandhas are metalinguistic markers and not pronounced in the final derived form, pada, they are elided by P. 1.3.9 – 'There is elision of that.' Accordingly, defines the anubandhas as follows:
  1. Nasalized vowels, e.g. bhañjO. Cf. P. 1.3.2.
  2. A final consonant. Cf. P. 1.3.3.
    2. except a dental, m and s in verbal or nominal endings. Cf. P. 1.3.4.
  3. Initial ñi ṭu ḍu. Cf. P 1.3.5
  4. Initial ṣ of a suffix. Cf. P. 1.3.6.
  5. Initial palatals and cerebrals of a suffix. Cf. P. 1.3.7
  6. Initial l, ś, and velars but not in a taddhita 'secondary' suffix. Cf. P. 1.3.8.
A few examples of elements that contain its are as follows:
Pāṇini's Ashtadhyayi has three associated texts.
The Shiva Sutras describe a phonemic notational system in the fourteen initial lines preceding the Ashtadhyayi. The notational system introduces different clusters of phonemes that serve special roles in the morphology of Sanskrit, and are referred to throughout the text. Each cluster, called a pratyāhara ends with a dummy sound called an anubandha, which acts as a symbolic referent for the list. Within the main text, these clusters, referred through the anubandhas, are related to various grammatical functions.

Dhatupatha

The Dhatupatha is a lexicon of Sanskrit verbal roots subservient to the Ashtadhyayi. It is organised by the ten present classes of Sanskrit, i.e. the roots are grouped by the form of their stem in the present tense.
The ten present classes of Sanskrit are:
  1. '
  2. '
  3. '
  4. '
  5. '
  6. '
  7. '
  8. '
  9. '
  10. '
The small number of class 8 verbs are a secondary group derived from class 5 roots, and class 10 is a special case, in that any verb can form class 10 presents, then assuming causative meaning. The roots specifically listed as belonging to class 10 are those for which any other form has fallen out of use.

Ganapatha

The Ganapatha is a list of groups of primitive nominal stems used by the Ashtadhyayi.

Commentary

After Pāṇini, the Mahābhāṣya| of Patañjali on the Ashtadhyayi is one of the three most famous works in Sanskrit grammar. It was with Patañjali that Indian linguistic science reached its definite form. The system thus established is extremely detailed as to shiksha and vyakarana. Syntax is scarcely touched, but nirukta is discussed, and these etymologies naturally lead to semantic explanations. People interpret his work to be a defence of, whose Sūtras are elaborated meaningfully. He also attacks Katyayana rather severely. But the main contributions of Patañjali lies in the treatment of the principles of grammar enunciated by him.

Other information

Pāṇini's work has been one of the important sources of cultural, religious, and geographical information about ancient India, with he himself being referred to as a Hindu scholar of grammar and linguistics. His work, for example, illustrates the word Vasudeva as a proper noun in an honorific sense, that can equally mean a divine or an ordinary person. This has been interpreted by scholars as attesting the significance of god Vasudeva or the opposite. The concept of dharma is attested in his sutra 4.4.41 as, dharmam carati or "he observes dharma ". Much social, geographical and historical information has been thus inferred from a close reading of Pāṇini's grammar.

Editions

The learning of Indian curriculum in late classical times had at its heart a system of grammatical study and linguistic analysis. The core text for this study was the Aṣṭādhyāyī of Pāṇini, the sine qua non of learning. This grammar of had been the object of intense study for the ten centuries prior to the composition of the Bhaṭṭikāvya. It was plainly 's purpose to provide a study aid to Pāṇini's text by using the examples already provided in the existing grammatical commentaries in the context of the gripping and morally improving story of the. To the dry bones of this grammar Bhaṭṭi has given juicy flesh in his poem. The intention of the author was to teach this advanced science through a relatively easy and pleasant medium. In his own words:

This composition is like a lamp to those who perceive the meaning of words and like a hand mirror for a blind man to those without grammar.
This poem, which is to be understood by means of a commentary, is a joy to those sufficiently learned: through my fondness for the scholar I have here slighted the dullard.

Bhaṭṭikāvya 22.33–34.

Modern linguistics

Pāṇini's work became known in 19th-century Europe, where it influenced modern linguistics initially through Franz Bopp, who mainly looked at Pāṇini. Subsequently, a wider body of work influenced Sanskrit scholars such as Ferdinand de Saussure, Leonard Bloomfield, and Roman Jakobson. Frits Staal discussed the impact of Indian ideas on language in Europe. After outlining the various aspects of the contact, Staal notes that the idea of formal rules in language – proposed by Ferdinand de Saussure in 1894 and developed by Noam Chomsky in 1957 – has origins in the European exposure to the formal rules of Pāṇinian grammar. In particular, de Saussure, who lectured on Sanskrit for three decades, may have been influenced by Pāṇini and Bhartrihari; his idea of the unity of signifier-signified in the sign somewhat resembles the notion of Sphoṭa. More importantly, the very idea that formal rules can be applied to areas outside of logic or mathematics may itself have been catalysed by Europe's contact with the work of Sanskrit grammarians.

De Saussure

Pāṇini, and the later Indian linguist Bhartrihari, 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 and with Charles S. Peirce on the other side, to semiotics, although the concept Saussure used was semiology. Saussure himself cited Indian grammar as an influence on some of his ideas. In his Mémoire sur le système primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-européennes published in 1879, he mentions Indian grammar as an influence on his idea that "reduplicated aorists represent imperfects of a verbal class." In his De l'emploi du génitif absolu en sanscrit published in 1881, he specifically mentions Pāṇini as an influence on the work.
Prem Singh, in his foreword to the reprint edition of the German translation of Pāṇini's Grammar in 1998, concluded that the "effect Panini's work had on Indo-European linguistics shows itself in various studies" and that a "number of seminal works come to mind," including Saussure's works and the analysis that "gave rise to the laryngeal theory," further stating: "This type of structural analysis suggests influence from Panini's analytical teaching." George Cardona, however, warns against overestimating the influence of Pāṇini on modern linguistics: "Although Saussure also refers to predecessors who had taken this Paninian rule into account, it is reasonable to conclude that he had a direct acquaintance with Panini's work. As far as I am able to discern upon rereading Saussure's Mémoire, however, it shows no direct influence of Paninian grammar. Indeed, on occasion, Saussure follows a path that is contrary to Paninian procedure."

Leonard Bloomfield

The founding father of American structuralism, Leonard Bloomfield, wrote a 1927 paper titled "On some rules of Pāṇini".

Comparison with modern formal systems

Pāṇini's grammar is the world's first formal system, developed well before the 19th century innovations of Gottlob Frege and the subsequent development of mathematical logic. In designing his grammar, Pāṇini used the method of "auxiliary symbols", in which new affixes are designated to mark syntactic categories and the control of grammatical derivations. This technique, rediscovered by the logician Emil Post, became a standard method in the design of computer programming languages. Sanskritists now accept that Pāṇini's linguistic apparatus is well-described as an "applied" Post system. Considerable evidence shows ancient mastery of context-sensitive grammars, and a general ability to solve many complex problems. Frits Staal has written that "Panini is the Indian Euclid."

Other works

Two literary works are attributed to Pāṇini, though they are now lost.