Panini

The accepted cultivated speech of the contemporary language that Pāṇini describes in his Aṣṭādhyāyī must have coexisted with more vernacular varieties of speech in which there were features belonging to the Middle Indo-Aryan division of the language group. Several facts support this view.

Among the earliest attempts to explain Pāṇini was the formulation of rules of interpretation or paribhāshās; a collection of these was made in the last century by Nāgojibhaṭṭa in his Paribhāshenduçekhara.

The word `Sanskrit' means “prepared, pure, refined or prefect”. It was not for nothing that it was called the `devavani' (language of the Gods). It has an outstanding place in our culture and indeed was recognized as a language of rare sublimity by the whole world. Sanskrit was the language of our philosophers, our scientists, our mathematicians, our poets and playwrights, our grammarians, our jurists, etc. In grammar, Panini and Patanjali (authors of Ashtadhyayi and the Mahabhashya) have no equals in the world; in astronomy and mathematics the works of Aryabhata, Brahmagupta and Bhaskara opened up new frontiers for mankind, as did the works of Charaka and Sushruta in medicine.

Panini’s grammar is the earliest scientific grammar in the world, the earliest extant grammar of any language, and one of the greatest ever written. It was the discovery of Sanskrit by the West, at the end of the 18th century, and the study of Indian methods of analyzing language that revolutionized our study of language and grammar, and gave rise to our science of comparative philology … The study of language in India was much more objective and scientific than in Greece or Rome. The interest was in empirical investigation of language, rather than philosophical and syntactical. Indian study of language was as objective as the dissection of a body by an anatomist.

The medicine of Sushruta is considerably older than the ninth century; and the grammar of Panini probably precedes Christianity.

Panini was a Sanskrit grammarian who gave a comprehensive and scientific theory of phonetics, phonology, and morphology. Sanskrit was the classical literary language of the Indian Hindus and Panini is considered the founder of the language and literature. It is interesting to note that the word "Sanskrit" means "complete" or "perfect" and it was thought of as the divine language, or language of the gods.

For example, the great linguist Panini gave the concept for meta-language-and constructed one-thousands of years before computer scientists began exploring the same idea. No one has been able to match him to this day.

The author of the oldest extant Sanskrit grammar was Panini, a native of extreme north-west India, ... His work consists of nearly 4000 aphorisms, each of which owing to the extreme conciseness of the style, generally consists of not more than two or three words. Hence, the whole grammar could be printed within the compass of about thirty-five octavo pages. Yet it describes the entire Sanskrit language with a completeness which has never been equalled elsewhere. Thus it is at once the shortest and the fullest grammar in the world.

The Pāṇinian commentator Kātyāyana (c. 3rd–4th century BCE) knew of the coexistence of Middle Indic forms with earlier ones. There is a Pāṇinian rule that provides that verb bases listed in an appendix to the Aṣṭādhyāyī have the class name dhātu (verbal base, root). Kātyāyana discusses whether one could define verbal bases semantically and thereby possibly do without the verb list. He remarks that even if one defines a verbal base as denoting an action, the roots must be listed in order to preclude the possibility that constituents of terms such as āṇapayati/āṇavayati ‘commands’ be assigned the class name in question; āṇapayati/āṇavayati is a Middle Indic counterpart of Sanskrit ājñāpayati.

Classical Sanskrit theatre flourished during the first nine centuries CE. Aphorisms on acting appear in the writings of Panini, the Sanskrit grammarian of the 5th century BCE, and references to actors, dancers, mummers, theatrical companies, and academies are found in Kautilya’s book on statesmanship, the Artha-shastra (4th century BCE).

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 "script" and "scribe" in his Ashtadhyayi. These must have referred to Aramaic or early Kharosthi writing. It is believed by some that a work of such complexity would have been difficult to compile without written notes, though others have argued that he might have composed it with the help of a group of students whose memories served him as 'notepads' (as is typical in Vedic learning). Writing first reappears in India in the form of the Brāhmī script from the 3rd century BC in the Ashokan inscriptions.

A treatise called Astadhyayi (or Astaka) is Panini's major work. It consists of eight chapters, each subdivided into quarter chapters. In this work Panini distinguishes between the language of sacred texts and the usual language of communication. Panini gives formal production rules and definitions to describe Sanskrit grammar. Starting with about 1700 basic elements like nouns, verbs, vowels, consonants he put them into classes. The construction of sentences, compound nouns etc., is explained as ordered rules operating on underlying structures in a manner similar to modern theory. In many ways Panini's constructions are similar to the way that a mathematical function is defined today.

The issue of theism vis-à-vis atheism, in the ordinary senses of the English words, played an important role in Indian thought. The ancient Indian tradition, however, classified the classical systems (darshanas) into orthodox (astika) and unorthodox (nastika). Astika does not mean “theistic,” nor does nastika mean “atheistic.” Panini, a 5th-century-BCE grammarian, stated that the former is one who believes in a transcendent world (asti paralokah) and the latter is one who does not believe in it (nasti paralokah).

The most successful, hence most prominent amongst these grammarians was Panini. His grammar, surpassing all others in tightness and precision, became the standard and remained so undisputedly until today. Panini was able to joint the original devanagari language into an exact framework of rules, thus preserving it for the posterity. Since his time, this language is called Sanskrit, “joined together, refined”.

We pass at once into the magnificent edifice which bears the name of Panini as its architect and which justly commands the wonder and admiration of everyone who enters, and which, by the very fact of its sufficing for all the phenomenon which language presents, bespeaks at once the marvelous ingenuity of its inventor and his profound penetration of the entire material of the language.