Person · Sanskrit grammarian · Pakistan
Pānini
Also known as Panini — Salatura tradition
The 5-4 century BCE Sanskrit grammarian Panini (c.520-460 BCE), author of the Ashtadhyayi (Eight-Chapter Grammar) — the first systematic grammatical description of any language and still one of the most sophisticated. The Ashtadhyayi contains 3,959 rules (sutras) that generate every valid Sanskrit word and sentence through algorithmic application. Panini's grammar is formally equivalent to a context-free grammar and prefigures the formal theories of 20-century Noam Chomsky's generative linguistics (Chomsky explicitly credited Panini in his 1965 Aspects of the Theory of Syntax). Panini is traditionally associated with the village of Salatura in Gandhara (modern Lahur, Pakistan). The Ashtadhyayi was commented on by Katyayana (3rd century BCE) and Patanjali's Mahabhashya (c.150 BCE), together forming the Trimuni (Three Sages) of Sanskrit grammar.
- Date
- -500–-350
- Function
- Learning & scholarship
- Condition
- historical/textual tradition
- Confidence
- Mixed / layered — traditional birthplace attribution; text firmly established
- Location
- 34.050, 71.850 (approximate)
Worth knowing
His own grammar names Salatura, on the Indus near modern Attock, as his home, and tradition has him teach at Taxila. The Ashtadhyayi's four thousand rules are the most complete description of any language made before the twentieth century. He also mentions the Yavanas, which is the earliest Indian reference to Greeks, on a frontier then in contact with Persian administration and Aramaic writing.
About the place
Placed at Shalatula near the Indus above Attock, the village the grammatical tradition names as his — the one biographical detail about him that has any early support.
Connections (5)
- Script continuity withTurfan & Gaochang
Sanskrit grammatical texts in the Paninian tradition turn up among the Turfan manuscripts, copied for monks who needed to read Buddhist Sanskrit at the edge of the Gobi — the same discipline, taught from the same sutras, three thousand kilometres from where Panini worked at Shalatula. Alongside them are the Tokharian texts, in an Indo-European language closer to Latin than to Sanskrit, in the middle of Asia.
- TransmissionAbu'l-Faiz Faizi
Faizi's Persian version of the Lilavati, Bhaskara's twelfth-century treatise on arithmetic and mensuration, is part of the same programme that produced Persian Mahabharata and Ramayana, and it is how Sanskrit mathematics entered the Islamic scholarly world a second time — six centuries after the Indian numerals had gone the other way through Baghdad.
- Teaching lineageTakshashilā / Taxila
Panini's own Ashtadhyayi names Salatura, on the Indus near modern Attock, as his home, and tradition has him teach at Taxila. His grammar of some four thousand rules is the most complete description of any language made before the twentieth century, and it was composed in Gandhara — at the end of the Achaemenid empire's Indian frontier rather than in the Gangetic heartland.
- Site adjacencyGandhāra
Gandhara in the fourth century BCE was a province in contact with Persian administration, Aramaic writing and the beginnings of Kharosthi, and Panini's grammar is a product of that frontier. He mentions the Yavanas, which is the earliest Indian reference to Greeks, and his rule for deriving words from names includes one that has been read as evidence for a script in use.
- Commented onPatanjali
Patanjali's Mahabhashya is the central commentary on Panini's Ashtadhyayi — the earliest surviving grammatical treatise of any Indo-European language — and is the text through which the Sanskrit grammatical tradition reached the European Orientalists in the eighteenth century. The Mahabhashya is itself in sutra and bhashya form, with Patanjali's explanations longer than Panini's rules; it preserves fragments of Katyayana's intermediate commentary and makes the entire post-Paninian grammatical tradition legible.
On these journeys
Sources
Ashtadhyayi; classical grammatical commentarial tradition; modern Sanskrit scholarship.
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