Pāṇini

Pāṇini (c. 5th–4th century BCE) was a Sanskrit grammarian from Śalātura in Gandhāra (near modern Attock, Pakistan) whose Aṣṭādhyāyī (“Eight Chapters”) is the most complete and rigorous grammar of any language produced before modern times, and one of the greatest intellectual achievements of the ancient world. In about 3,959 short rules (sūtras), arranged with extraordinary economy and using an artificial meta-language of technical symbols, it describes the phonology, morphology and syntax of Sanskrit so completely that, applied in the correct order, its rules can generate every correct form of the language. Pāṇini’s grammar fixed the form of Classical Sanskrit, the language of Indian philosophy, science and literature for two thousand years; it founded the Indian sciences of language, from which Bhartṛhari’s philosophy of language and the Mīmāṃsā theory of meaning grew; and when European scholars discovered it in the nineteenth century, it transformed Western linguistics.

The Aṣṭādhyāyī

Structure

The Aṣṭādhyāyī consists of eight chapters, each of four quarters, containing about 4,000 sūtras. It is accompanied by three auxiliary texts: the Śivasūtras, fourteen lines listing the sounds of Sanskrit in a special order; the Dhātupāṭha, a list of about 2,000 verbal roots; and the Gaṇapāṭha, lists of words subject to particular rules.

Method

Pāṇini’s grammar is generative: it begins with roots and affixes and derives complete words and sentences through ordered rules. It uses several brilliant devices:

• Pratyāhāras (abbreviations): the Śivasūtras arrange the sounds so that any class of sounds needed by a rule can be named by two symbols — the first sound and a final marker. aC means all vowels, haL all consonants. One of the fourteen lines, the famous a i uṆ, lists the first three vowels.
• Anubandhas (markers): silent letters attached to roots and affixes that are not pronounced but signal how the element behaves.
• Metarules (paribhāṣās): rules about how rules apply, which rule wins in a conflict, and how to interpret technical terms.
• Anuvṛtti (recurrence): a word stated in one rule is understood to continue in the following rules until cancelled, saving enormous space.
• Kāraka theory: a semantic analysis of the roles of participants in an action — agent, object, instrument, recipient, source, location — that anticipates modern case grammar.

The result is a system of astonishing economy. A traditional saying has it that “grammarians rejoice over the saving of half a short vowel as over the birth of a son.”

Commentators

Pāṇini’s grammar was refined by Kātyāyana (c. 3rd century BCE), whose Vārttikas (“Notes”) supplement and correct it, and by Patañjali (2nd century BCE), whose Mahābhāṣya (“Great Commentary”) discusses both in a lively dialogue form and is itself a classic of philosophical prose. These three — Pāṇini, Kātyāyana and Patañjali — are revered as the “three sages” (munitraya) of grammar. Later grammarians — Bhartṛhari, the authors of the Kāśikā, Bhaṭṭoji Dīkṣita (Siddhāntakaumudī, 17th century), Nāgeśa — continued the tradition, and Sanskrit is still taught through Pāṇini in traditional schools.

Significance

When European scholars encountered Pāṇini in the nineteenth century, he revolutionised linguistics. The comparative philologists — Franz Bopp, Max Müller — learned from Indian grammatical analysis to break words into roots and affixes. Ferdinand de Saussure was a Sanskritist; Leonard Bloomfield modelled his work on Pāṇini and called the Aṣṭādhyāyī “one of the greatest monuments of human intelligence”; and the generative grammars of Noam Chomsky have been compared with it. Computer scientists have noted the resemblance between Pāṇini’s formal notation and the Backus–Naur form used to specify programming languages. In Indian thought, grammar (vyākaraṇa) became a darśana in its own right — the philosophy of language of Bhartṛhari, who held that the Word is the ultimate reality.

In conversation

The single fact worth knowing: a man in ancient Gandhāra wrote, in about four thousand rules, a complete generative grammar of a language — two and a half thousand years before linguistics existed.