Pāṇini

For other uses, see Panini (disambiguation).

Pāṇini (Devanāgarī: पाणिनि, IPA: [pɑːɳɪn̪ɪ]) was an ancient Indian grammarian from Gandhara (traditionally 520–460 BC, but estimates range from the 7th to 5th centuries BC). He is most famous for his Sanskrit grammar, particularly for his formulation of the 3,959 rules of Sanskrit morphology in the grammar known as Aṣṭādhyāyī (meaning "eight chapters"). It is the earliest known grammar of Sanskrit (though scholars agree it likely built on earlier works), and the earliest known work on descriptive linguistics, generative linguistics, and perhaps linguistics as a whole. Panini's comprehensive and scientific theory of grammar is conventionally taken to mark the end of the period of Vedic Sanskrit, by definition introducing Classical Sanskrit.

Dating

Nothing definite is known about Pāṇini's life, not even the century he lived in (he lived almost certainly after the 7th and before the 4rd century BC). According to tradition, he was born in Shalatula, Punjab, a town beside the Indus river, in Gandhara which is near modern day Peshawar, NWFP of Pakistan and lived circa 520–460 BC. His grammar defines Classical Sanskrit, so that Pāṇini per definition lived at the end of the Vedic period: he notes a few special rules, marked chandasi ("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 Pāṇini is the occurrence of the word yavanānī (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 Pāṇini may well have lived as early as the time of Darius the Great (ruled 521 BC–485/6 BC). Though when Alexander entered India, there were existing Greek settlements as mentioned by Plutarch in his Lives. And there may have even been a trading route between the two areas which accounts for the introduction of certain herbs in both the most ancient ayurvedic and Greek materia medica.

Writing

It is not certain whether Pāṇini used writing for the composition of his work, though it is generally agreed that he did use a form of writing, based on references to words such as "script" and "scribe" in his Ashtadhyayi. It is believed that a work of such complexity would have been very difficult to compile without written notes, though some have argued that he might have composed it with the help of a group of students whose memories served him as 'notepads'. Writing first reappears in India (since the Indus script) in the form of the Brāhmī script from at least the 6th century BC, though these early instances of the Brāhmī script are from Tamil Nadu in southern India, quite distant from Gandhara in northwestern India. However, Gandhara was under Persian rule in the 6th century BC, so it's also possible that he used the Aramaic alphabet from which the Brāhmī script may have descended from.

Work

Pāṇini's grammar of Sanskrit consists of following 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. Now most of the Indian states(Kashmir to Kerala-Kanyakumari) have learning centers of this ancient language,and it is easy to learn.Recent studies shows sanskrit is very compatible for computers and the researches are progressing.

The commentary on Panini's grammar: Mahābhāṣya

After Panini, the Mahābhāṣya ("great commentary") of Patañjali on the celebrated 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 (phonology, including accent) and vyakarana (morphology). Syntax is scarcely touched, but nirukta (etymology) is discussed, and these etymologies naturally lead to semantic explanations. People interpret his work to be a defense of Panini, whose Sūtras are elaborated meaningfully. He also attacks Kātyāyana rather severely. But the main contributions of Patañjali lies in the treatment of the principles of grammar enunciated by him.

Panini and modern linguistics

Thus 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. Noam Chomsky has always acknowledged his debt to Pāṇini for his modern notion of an explicit generative grammar. In Optimality Theory, the hypothesis about the relation between specific and general constraints is known as "Panini's Theorem on Constraint Ranking". Paninian grammars have also been devised for non-Sanskrit languages. His work was the forerunner to modern formal language theory (mathematical linguistics) and formal grammar, and a precursor to computing.

Panini and modern computing

Pāṇini's use of metarules, transformations, and recursion together make his grammar as rigorous as a modern Turing machine. In this sense Pāṇini may be considered the father of computing machines. The Backus-Naur form (Panini-Backus form) or BNF grammars used to describe modern programming languages have significant similarities to Pāṇini's grammar rules.

Panini's vocabulary

While Pāṇini'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) dharmam carati "he observes the law".

References

• O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Pāṇini", MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, University of St Andrews 2002.
• Prince, Alan and Paul Smolensky (2004): Optimality Theory: Constraint Interaction in Generative Grammar. Oxford: Blackwell.
• T.R.N. Rao. Panini-backus form of languages. 1998.

See also

• Sanskrit grammarians
• List of linguists
• Pingala

External links

• Pāṇini's Ashtadhyayi in ITRANSliteration and devanagari script
• Software based on Pāṇini's Sanskrit Grammar
• Indian Logic and Ontology. A Survey of Contemporary Studies
• Panini, Nagarjuna and Whitehead - The Relevance of Whitehead for Contemporary Buddhist Philosophy