Pāṇini: Grammar

“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.”

Pāṇini

—Walter Eugene Clark ,.Quoted from Gewali, Salil (2013). Great Minds on India. New Delhi: Penguin Random House.

World , Science , Study

“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.”

Pāṇini

Gazetteer in: Sanskrit literature http://dsal.uchicago.edu/reference/gazetteer/pager.html?objectid=DS405.1.I34_V02_298.gif,The Digital South Asia Library - University of Chicago (dsal.uchicago.edu)

World

“The Mahābhāshya was commented on in the seventh century by Bhartṛihari in his Vākyapadīya which is concerned with the philosophy of grammar, and by Kaiyaṭa (probably thirteenth century). About 650 A. D. was composed the first complete commentary on Pāṇini, the Kāçikā Vṛitti or "Benares Commentary," by Jayāditya and Vāmana.”

Pāṇini

Appendix A History of Sanskrit Literature

“The grammar of Panini is one of the most remarkable literary works that the world has ever seen, and no other country can produce any grammatical system at all comparable to it, either for originality of plan or analytical subtlety.”

Pāṇini

Sir Monier Monier-Williams in: Indian Wisdom https://books.google.co.in/books?id=CgBAAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA172, W. H. Allen & Company, 1876, p. 172.

World , Country

“Though its fame is much restricted by its specialized nature, there is no doubt that Panini's grammar is one of the greatest intellectual achievements of any ancient civilization, and the most detailed and scientific grammar composed before the 19th century in any part of the world.”

Pāṇini

Professor A. L. Basham in: Daya Kishan Thussu Communicating India's Soft Power: Buddha to Bollywood https://books.google.co.in/books?id=Ab_QAQAAQBAJ&pg=PA47, Palgrave Macmillan, 24 October 2013, p. 47.

World , Nature , Parting

“Ashtadhyayi Sanskrit treatise on grammar was written in the 6th to 5th century BCE by the Indian grammarian Panini. This work set the linguistic standards for Classical Sanskrit. It sums up in 4,000 sutras the science of phonetics and grammar that had evolved in the Vedic religion. Panini divided his work into eight chapters, each of which is further divided into quarter chapters, beyond defining the morphology and syntax of Sanskrit language.”

Pāṇini

Encyclopedia Britannica in: Panini Indian grammarian http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/441324/Panini, britannica.com.

Religion , Science

“Sanskrit is a scientific and systematic language. Its grammar is perfect and has attracted scholars worldwide. Sanskrit has a perfect grammar which has been explained to us by the world's greatest grammarian Panini.”

Pāṇini

An Analytical Study of 'Sanskrit' and 'Panini' as Foundation of Speech Communication in India and the World

World , Perfection

“Grammars (vyākaraṇas) concern the description of speech forms (śabda) considered to be correct (sādhu) through derivation and thereby serve to make understood the usage found in the Vedas. The grammar that was granted the status of a Vedāṅga is that of Pāṇini. This work is referred to in toto as a śabdānuśāsana (means of instruction of correct speech forms); since the core of Pāṇini’s work comprises the eight chapters of sūtras that serve to describe both the current language of his time and features particular to Vedic, it also bears the name Aṣṭādhyāyī”

Pāṇini

“Collection of Eight Chapters”
Prof. George Cardona in: Indo-Aryan languages http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/286348/Indo-Aryan-languages/74594/Characteristics-of-Old-Indo-Aryan-texts#ref603388, britannica.com., 20 January 2014.

Time

“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.”

Pāṇini

An Analytical Study of 'Sanskrit' and 'Panini' as Foundation of Speech Communication in India and the World

Way , Communication , Mathematics

“Ashtadhyayi distinguishes between usage in the spoken language and usage that is proper to the language of the sacred texts. The Ashtadhyayi is generative as well as descriptive. With its complex use of metarules, transformations, and recursions, the grammar in Ashtadhyayi has been likened to the Turing machine, an idealized mathematical model that reduces the logical structure of any computing device to its essentials.”

Pāṇini

Encyclopedia Britannica in: "Panini Indian grammarian".

Mathematics

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

Pāṇini

Horace Hayman Wilson in: The Vishńu Puráńa: A System of Hindu Mythology and Tradition https://books.google.co.in/books?id=rpVTAAAAcAAJ&pg=PR38, J. Murray, 1840, p. 38.

“There is in the rules or definitions (sutras) of Panini a remarkably subtle and penetrating account of Sanskrit grammar. The construction of sentences, compound nouns, and the like is explained through ordered rules operating on underlying structures in a manner strikingly similar in part to modes of modern theory. As might be imagined, this perceptive Indian grammatical work held great fascination for 20th-century theoretical linguists. A study of Indian logic in relation to Paninian grammar alongside AristotleAristotelian]] and Western logic in relation to Greek grammar and its successors could bring illuminating insights.”

Pāṇini

Pavle Ivić in: "Linguistics".

Imagination , Study , Parting

“The current language Pāṇini describes is very close in structure to the late Vedic found in certain Brāhmaṇa texts. As noted earlier, scholars have recognized other varieties of Sanskrit. Epic Sanskrit is so called because it is represented principally in the two epics, Mahābhārata (“Great Epic of the Bhārata Dynasty”) and Rāmāyaṇa (“Romance of Rāma”). In the latter the term saṃskṛta ‘adorned, cultivated, purified (by grammar)’ is encountered, possibly for the first time with reference to the language. The date of composition for the core of early Epic Sanskrit is considered to be in the centuries just preceding the Common Era.”

Pāṇini

Prof. George Cardona in:"Indo-Aryan languages".

Time

“The most interesting non-Western grammatical tradition—and the most original and independent—is that of India, which dates back at least two and one-half millennia and which culminates with the grammar of Panini, of the 5th century BCE. There are three major ways in which the Sanskrit tradition has had an impact on modern linguistic scholarship.”

Pāṇini

Pavle Ivić in: Linguistics http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/342418/linguistics#ref411727, britannica.com, 9 April 2013.

Way

“In the fifteenth century Rāmachandra, in his Prakriyā-kaumudī, or "Moonlight of Method," endeavoured to make Pāṇini's grammar easier by a more practical arrangement of its matter. Bhaṭṭoji's Siddhānta-kaumudī (seventeenth century) has a similar aim; an abridgment of this work, the Laghu-kaumudī, by Varadarāja is commonly used as an introduction to the native system of grammar. Among non-Pāṇinean grammarians may be mentioned Chandra (about 600 A. D.), the pseudo-Çākaṭāyana (later than the Kāçikā), and, the most important, Hemachandra (12th century), author of a Prākrit grammar.”

Pāṇini

Appendix A History of Sanskrit Literature

“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.””

Pāṇini

An Analytical Study of 'Sanskrit' and 'Panini' as Foundation of Speech Communication in India and the World

Time , Success

“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.”

Pāṇini

Justice Markandey Katju in Speech delivered on 13.10.2009 in the Indian Institute of Science Bangalore in: Sanskrit As A Language Of Science http://www.iisc.ernet.in/misc/bang_speech.html, Indian Institute of Science.

God , World , Mathematics

“Pāṇini's grammar defines Classical Sanskrit, so Pāṇini by 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. These indicate that Vedic Sanskrit was already archaic, but still a comprehensible dialect.”

Pāṇini

An Analytical Study of 'Sanskrit' and 'Panini' as Foundation of Speech Communication in India and the World

Time

“The grammar of Panini stands supreme among the grammars of the world, alike for its precision of statement, and for its thorough analysis of the roots of the language and of the formative principles of words. By employing an algebraic terminology, it attains a sharp succinctness unrivalled in brevity, but at times enigmatical. It arranges, in logical harmony, the whole phenomena which the Sanskrit language presents, and stands forth as one of the most splendid achievements of human invention and industry. So elaborate is the structure, that doubts have arisen whether its complex rules of formation and phonetic change, its polysyllabic derivatives, its ten conjugations with their multiform aorists and long array of tenses, could ever have been the spoken language of a people.”

Pāṇini

—Sir William Wilson Hunter, .Quoted from Gewali, Salil (2013). Great Minds on India. New Delhi: Penguin Random House.

World , Time , People , Change