Panini (, ) was a Sanskrit grammarian, logician, philologist, and revered scholar of Ancient India during the mid-1st millennium BCE, dated variously by most scholars between the 6thâÂÂ5th and 4th centuries BCE.
The historical facts of his life are unknown, except only what can be inferred from his works, and legends recorded long after. His most notable work, the Ashtadhyayi (Aá¹£á¹ÂÃÂdhyÃÂyë) (Devanagari: à ¤ à ¤·à ¥Âà ¤Âà ¤¾à ¤§à ¥Âà ¤¯à ¤¾à ¤¯à ¥Â), is conventionally taken to mark the start of Classical Sanskrit. His work formally codified Classical Sanskrit as a refined and standardized language, making use of a technical metalanguage consisting of a syntax, morphology, and lexicon, organised according to a series of meta-rules.
Since the exposure of European scholars to his Ashtadhyayi in the nineteenth century, Panini has been considered the "first descriptive linguist", and even labelled as "the father of linguistics". His approach to grammar influenced such foundational linguists as Ferdinand de Saussure and Leonard Bloomfield.
The name Panini is a patronymic meaning descendant of Paá¹Âina. His full name was Daká¹£iputra Panini according to verses 1.75.13 and 3.251.12 of Patanjali's Mahabhashya MahÃÂbhÃÂá¹£ya, with the first part suggesting his mother's name was Daká¹£i.
Nothing definite is known about when Panini lived, not even in which century he lived. Panini has been dated between the seventh or sixth and fourth century BCE.
George Cardona (1997) in his authoritative survey and review of Panini-related studies, states that the available evidence strongly supports a dating not before 400 BCE, while earlier dating depends on interpretations and is not probative.
Based on numismatic findings, von Hinüber (1989) and Falk (1993) place Panini in the mid-4th century BCE. Panini's rupya (A 5.2.119, A 5.2.120, A. 5.4.43, A 4.3.153,) mentions a specific gold coin, the niṣka, in several sutras, which originated in India in the 4th-century BCE. According to Houben, "the date of " for Panini is thus based on concrete evidence which till now has not been refuted." According to Bronkhorst (2016), there is no reason to doubt the validity of Von Hinüber's and Falk's argument, setting the terminus post quem for the date of Panini at 350 BCE or the decades thereafter. According to Bronkhorst,
It is not certain whether Panini 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 ("script") and lipikara ("scribe") in section 3.2 of the Ashtadhyayi. The dating of the introduction of writing to present day North West Pakistan may therefore give further information on the historical dating of Panini.
Panini cites at least ten grammarians and linguists before him: ÃÂpià Âali, KÃÂà Âyapa, GÃÂrgya, GÃÂlava, CÃÂkravarmaá¹Âa, BhÃÂradvÃÂja, à ÂÃÂkaá¹ÂÃÂyana, à ÂÃÂkalya, Senaka, Sphoá¹ÂÃÂyana and Yaska. According to Kamal K. Misra, Panini references Yaska's Nirukta, "whose writings date back to the middle of the 4th century B.C".
The Sanskrit epic Brihatkatha and the Buddhist scripture Mañjuà Ârë-mà «la-kalpa both mention Panini to have been a contemporary with the king Dhana Nanda (reigned 329-321 BCE), the last monarch of the Nanda Empire before Chandragupta Maurya came to power.
Cardona offers an earlier date for Panini, by arguing the compound word , discussed in sutra 4.1.49, instead of referring to a writing (lipi) c.q. cuneiform of the Achaemenid Empire, or the Greek of Alexander the Great, refers to Greek women; and that Indus valley residents possibly had contacts with Greek women before Darius's 535 BCE, or Alexander's 326 BCE conquests. K. B. Pathak (1930) argues that the kumÃÂraà Âramaá¹Âa, of sutra 2.1.70, derived from à Âramaá¹Âa, which refers to female renunciates, c.q. "Buddhist nuns", could also refer to Jain Aryika, of unknown origin, possibly permitting Panini to be placed before the, 5th century BCE, Gautama Buddha. Others, based on Panini's linguistic style, date his works to the sixth or fifth century BCE, as:
Nothing certain is known about Panini's personal life. In an inscription of Siladitya VII of Valabhi, he is called à ÂalÃÂturiya, which means "a man from Salatura". This means Panini lived in Salatura in ancient Gandhara (present day north-west Pakistan), which likely was near Lahor, a town at the junction of the Indus and Kabul rivers. According to the memoirs of the 7th-century Chinese scholar Xuanzang, there was a town called Suoluoduluo on the Indus where Panini was born, and where he composed the Qingming-lun (Sanskrit: VyÃÂkaraá¹Âa).
According to Hartmut Scharfe, Panini lived in GandÃÂra, while a satrapy of the Achaemenid Empire, post the, c. 535 BCE, Achaemenid conquest of the Indus Valley, but before the, 327 BCE, conquest of Alexander the Great. He must, therefore, have been technically a Persian subject but his work shows no awareness of the Persian language. According to Patrick Olivelle, Panini's text and references to him elsewhere suggest that "he was clearly a northerner, probably from the northwestern region".
According to KathÃÂsaritsÃÂgara legends Panini studied under his guru Varsha in Pataliputra (modern Patna). Not the brightest of his disciples, on the advice of Varsha's wife, Panini went to the Himalayas to do penance and gain knowledge from Shiva. Sutras were granted by Shiva, who danced and played his damaru before Panini and produced the basic sounds of these sutras, Panini accepted them and they are now known as the Shiva Sutras. Armed with this new grammar Panini came back from the Himalayas to Pataliputra. But at the same time, Vararuchi, another disciple of Varsha had learned of a grammar from Indra. They engaged in a debate which lasted eight days and on the last day, with Vararuchi emerging dominant, Panini was able to defeat him with the help of Shiva who destroyed Vararuchi's grammar book. Panini then defeated the rest of Varsha's disciples and emerged as the greatest grammarian.
Panini is believed to have spent the major portion of his life in Pataliputra and according to some pandits, he was born and brought up there, the ancestors of Panini having already moved there from Salatura. Panini, has also been associated with the University of Taxila.
Panini is also mentioned in Indian fables and other ancient texts. The Panchatantra, for example, mentions that Panini was killed by a lion.
According to some historians Pingala was the brother of Panini.'
Panini was depicted on a five-rupee Indian postage stamp in August 2004.
The most important of Panini's works, the Ashtadhyayi, is a grammatical treatise on the Sanskrit language. It is descriptive and generative with algebraic-like rules governing every aspect of the language. It is supplemented by three ancillary texts: the aká¹£arasamÃÂmnÃÂya, dhÃÂtupÃÂá¹Âha and gaá¹ÂapÃÂá¹Âha. Modeled on the dialect and register of elite speakers in his time, the text also accounts for some features of the older Vedic language.
Growing out of a centuries-long effort to preserve the language of the Vedic hymns from "corruption", the Aá¹£tÃÂdhyÃÂyë is the high point of a vigorous, sophisticated grammatical tradition devised to arrest language change. The Aá¹£tÃÂdhyÃÂyë<nowiki/>'s preeminence is underlined by the fact that it eclipsed all similar works that came before: while not the first, it is the oldest such text surviving in its entirety.
The Ashtadhyayi consists of 3,959 sà «tras in eight chapters, which are each subdivided into four sections or pÃÂdas. The text takes material from lexical lists (dhÃÂtupÃÂá¹Âha, gaá¹ÂapÃÂtha) as input and describes the algorithms to be applied to them for the generation of well-formed words. Such is its intricacy that the correct application of its rules and metarules is still being worked out centuries later.
The Ashtadhyayi, composed in an era when oral composition and transmission was the norm, is staunchly embedded in that oral tradition. In order to ensure wide dissemination, Panini is said to have preferred brevity over clarityâÂÂit can be recited end-to-end in two hours. This has led to the emergence of a great number of commentaries of his work over the centuries, which for the most part adhere to the foundations laid by Panini's work.
Indian curriculums in the late classical era had at their core a system of grammatical study and linguistic analysis. The core text for this study was the Ashtadhyayi of Panini, the sine qua non of learning. This grammar of Panini had been the object of intense study for the ten centuries prior to the composition of the Bhaá¹Âá¹ÂikÃÂvya. It was Bhaá¹Âá¹Âi's purpose to provide a study aid to Panini's text by using the examples already provided in the existing grammatical commentaries in the context of the RÃÂmÃÂyaá¹Âa. The intention of the author was to teach this advanced science through a relatively easy and pleasant medium. In his own words:
<blockquote> 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.
Bhaá¹Âá¹ÂikÃÂvya 22.33âÂÂ34. </blockquote>
Panini is known for his text Ashtadhyayi, a sutra-style treatise on Sanskrit grammar, which consists of 3,996 verses or rules on linguistics, syntax and semantics in "eight chapters" which is the foundational text of the VyÃÂkaraá¹Âa branch of the Vedanga, the auxiliary scholarly disciplines of the Vedic period. His aphoristic text attracted numerous bhashya (commentaries), of which the Mahabhashya by Patanjali is the most famous. His ideas influenced and attracted commentaries from scholars of other Indian religions such as Buddhism.
Panini's analysis of noun compounds still forms the basis of modern linguistic theories of compounding in Indian languages. Panini'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.
Panini'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.
Panini's work became known in 19th-century Europe, where it influenced modern linguistics initially through Franz Bopp. 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 â proposed by Ferdinand de Saussure in 1894 and developed by Noam Chomsky in 1957 â has origins in the European exposure to the formal rules of Paninian grammar. In particular, de Saussure, who lectured on Sanskrit for three decades, may have been influenced by Panini and Bhartrihari; his idea of the unity of the signifier-signified in the sign somewhat resembles the notion of Sphoá¹Âa. 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.
Panini, 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 (Memoir on the Original System of Vowels in the Indo-European Languages) 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 (On the Use of the Genitive Absolute in Sanskrit) published in 1881, he specifically mentions Panini as an influence on the work.
Prem Singh, in his foreword to the reprint edition of the German translation of Panini'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 Panini 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."
Panini's grammar has been described as "the first context-sensitive formal model of language", showing "many features of a formal, computationally implementable system" comparable to the modern BackusâÂÂNaur form. It is a rigorous formal system developed well before the 19th century innovations of Gottlob Frege and the subsequent development of mathematical logic.
In designing his grammar, Panini used the method of codifying rules through use of auxiliary markers, in which affixes are designated to mark syntactic categories and the control of grammatical derivations through replacement rules (e.g.: "what to do if a stem is marked as a past tense verb, what to do if a noun is marked as an instrumental object, how to indicate passive versus active, what sound adjustments to make for adjacent phonemes, and so forth"). This technique has been compared to the rewrite systems developed in the 1920s-1930s by the logician Emil Post, which became a standard method in the design of computer programming languages. Sanskritists now accept that Panini'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" and that the ancient Indian grammarians, especially Panini, had mastered methods of linguistic theory not rediscovered again until the 1950s and the applications of modern mathematical logic to linguistics by Noam Chomsky. (Chomsky himself has said that the first generative grammar in the modern sense was Panini's grammar).
Two literary works are attributed to Panini, though they are now lost.
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There are many proto-mathematical concepts found in Panini's works. Panini came up with a plethora of ideas to organize the known grammatical forms of his day in a systematic way. Like any mathematician who models a known phenomenon in mathematical language, Panini created a metalanguage which is very close to the modern-day ideas of algebra.