Text · Sanskrit grammar
Ashtadhyayi
/ɐʂʈaːdʱjáːjiː/
Also known as Aṣṭādhyāyī, Ashtadhyayi of Panini, Astadhyayi, Panini Sutras
Panini's grammar of Sanskrit: nearly four thousand terse rules (sutras) in eight chapters which, applied to lists of roots and stems, generate the correct words of the language as spoken by an elite of model speakers, with notes on older Vedic forms. It is the oldest linguistic text to survive complete, the foundation of Vyakarana among the Vedangas, and compact enough to recite end to end in two hours. European linguists from Franz Bopp to Saussure and Bloomfield learned from it.
- Date
- -600–-300
- Function
- Text & inscription
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
Worth knowing
Its first rule puts vṛddhi, which also means prosperity, at the very start for good luck, reversing the usual order in which the defined term comes last. Chomsky has said that the first generative grammar in the modern sense was Panini's.
Dated between the 6th and 4th centuries BCE. George Cardona (1997) finds the evidence supports no date earlier than 400 BCE; von Hinüber and Falk, from the coins the grammar names, place Panini in the mid-4th century BCE; others argue for an earlier date from his closeness to late Vedic language. Counts of the rules vary: 3,983 in one tally, 3,996 in another.
Connections (5)
- PrecursorRigveda
By about 1000 BCE the Rigveda's hymns had been consolidated and were handed down orally. As everyday speech drifted, concern that the hymns pass on uncorrupted drove a long tradition of phonetics and grammar whose high point is the Ashtadhyayi, which eclipsed its predecessors. The Rigveda's own oral apparatus, the padapatha that splits the hymns into separate words, belongs to the same effort to fix sound and form, and Panini still accounts for older Vedic forms beside the Sanskrit of his day.
- Historical linkNatya Shastra
The Natya Shastra's roots run back at least to the Natasutras, manuals of drama dated to around the middle of the first millennium BCE and known from their mention in Panini's grammar and in other late Vedic texts, which also name the early masters Shilalin and Krishashva. The Natya Shastra still calls actors Shailalinas after Shilalin. The earliest evidence for an Indian theory of drama is thus a grammarian's passing reference, well before the treatise reached its complete form.
- Associated withPanini
Nothing certain is known of Panini's life, so the grammar and its readers carry what there is. Eighth-century copper plates of the Maitraka king Siladitya VII call him Shalaturiya, the man from Salatura in Gandhara, and the coins the Ashtadhyayi names, the rupya and the nishka, led Oskar von Hinüber and Harry Falk to place him in the mid-4th century BCE. Patanjali's Mahabhashya preserves his full name, Dakshiputra Panini, his mother apparently being Dakshi.
- Commented onPatanjali
Patanjali's Mahabhashya, dated to the second century BCE, is the most famous commentary on the Ashtadhyayi. It covers 1,228 of its rules together with Katyayana's earlier critical notes, which survive only inside it, and reads as a defence of Panini against Katyayana that turns grammar into a philosophy of grammar. With it the Indian tradition of language study took its definitive form, and its date is the firmest anchor for placing Panini before about 321 BCE.
- Historical linkYavana / Yona
Sutra 4.1.49 of the Ashtadhyayi discusses the word yavanani, formed from Yavana. It has been read as the Old Persian cuneiform script, the Greek script, or Ionian women, and George Cardona uses it to argue that Panini's contact with the west could predate Darius I or Alexander. Panini wrote in Gandhara when it was nominally an Achaemenid satrapy, yet his grammar shows no Old Persian influence: the foreign name is there, the foreign language is not.
Sources
Wikipedia, "Aṣṭādhyāyī"; "Pāṇini"; "Mahabhashya". George Cardona, Pāṇini: His Work and its Traditions (1997).
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