Pāṇini

This article is about the ancient Sanskrit scholar. For other uses, see Panini (disambiguation).

Pāṇini
पाणिनि
Born	Northwest Indian subcontinent
Notable work	Aṣṭādhyāyī (Classical Sanskrit)
Era	fl. 4th century BCE; fl. 400–350 BCE; 7th–5th century BCE
Region	Indian philosophy
Main interests	Grammar, linguistics
Notable ideas	Descriptive linguistics

The greatest linguist of antiquity
Pāṇini.. was the greatest linguist of antiquity, and deserves to be treated as such.

— JF Staal, A reader on the Sanskrit Grammarians

Pāṇini (Sanskrit: पाणिनि, pronounced [paːɳin̪i]) was a logician, Sanskrit philologist, grammarian, and revered scholar in ancient India, variously dated between the 7th and 4th century BCE.

Since the discovery and publication of his work Aṣṭādhyāyī by European scholars in the nineteenth century, Pāṇini has been considered the "first descriptive linguist", and even labelled as "the father of linguistics". His approach to grammar influenced such foundational linguists as Ferdinand de Saussure and Leonard Bloomfield.

Biography

Father of linguistics
The history of linguistics begins not with Plato or Aristotle, but with the Indian grammarian Panini.

— Rens Bod, University of Amsterdam

The name Pāṇini is a patronymic meaning descendant of Paṇina. His full name was Dakṣiputra Pāṇini according to verses 1.75.13 and 3.251.12 of Patanjali's Mahābhāṣya, with the first part suggesting his mother's name was Dakṣi.

Dating

Nothing definite is known about when Pāṇini lived, not even in which century he lived. Pāṇini has been dated between the seventh and fourth century BCE.

George Cardona (1997) in his authoritative survey and review of Pāṇini-related studies, states that the available evidence strongly supports a dating not before 400 BCE, while earlier dating depends on interpretations and is not probative.

Based on numismatic findings, von Hinüber (1989) and Falk (1993) place Pāṇini in the mid-4th century BCE. Pāṇini's rupya (A 5.2.119, A 5.2.120, A. 5.4.43, A 4.3.153,) mentions a specific gold coin, the niṣka, in several sutras, which originated in India in the 4th-century BCE. According to Houben, "the date of "c. 350 BCE for Pāṇini is thus based on concrete evidence which till now has not been refuted." According to Bronkhorst, there is no reason to doubt the validity of Von Hinüber's and Falk's argument, setting the terminus post quem for the date of Pāṇini at 350 BCE or the decades thereafter. According to Bronkhorst,

...thanks to the work carried out by Hinüber (1990:34-35) and Falk (1993: 303-304), we now know that Pāṇini lived, in all probability, far closer in time to the period of Aśoka than had hitherto been thought. According to Falk's reasoning, Panini must have lived during the decade following 350 BCE, that is, just before (or contemporaneously with?) the invasion by Alexander of Macedonia.

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 lipi ("script") and lipikara ("scribe") in section 3.2 of the Aṣṭādhyāyī. The dating of the introduction of writing to present day North West Pakistan may therefore give further information on the historical dating of Pāṇini.

Pāṇini cites at least ten grammarians and linguists before him: Āpiśali, Kāśyapa, Gārgya, Gālava, Cākravarmaṇa, Bhāradvāja, Śākaṭāyana, Śākalya, Senaka, Sphoṭāyana and Yaska. According to Kamal K. Misra, Pāṇini references Yaska's Nirukta, "whose writings date back to the middle of the 4th century B.C".

The Sanskrit epic Brihatkatha and the Buddhist scripture Mañjuśrī-mūla-kalpa both mention Pāṇini to have been a contemporary with the king Dhana Nanda (reigned 329-321 BCE), the last monarch of the Nanda Empire before Chandragupta Maurya came to power.

Cardona offers an earlier date for Pāṇini, by arguing the compound word yavanānī, discussed in sutra 4.1.49, instead of referring to a writing (lipi) c.q. cuneiform of the Achaemenid Empire, or the Greek of Alexander the Great, refers to Greek women; and that Indus valley residents possibly had contacts with Greek women before Darius's 535 BCE, or Alexander's 326 BCE conquests. K. B. Pathak (1930) argues that the kumāraśramaṇa, of sutra 2.1.70, derived from śramaṇa, which refers to female renunciates, c.q. "Buddhist nuns", could also refer to Jain Aryika, of unknown origin, possibly permitting Pāṇini to be placed before the, 5th century BCE, Gautama Buddha. Others, based on Panini's linguistic style, date his works to the sixth or fifth century BCE, as:

• According to Bod, Pāṇini's grammar defines Classical Sanskrit, so Pāṇini is chronologically placed in the later part of the Vedic period, corresponding to the seventh to fifth century BCE.
• According to A. B. Keith, the Sanskrit text that most matches the language described by Pāṇini is the Aitareya Brāhmaṇa (c. 8th – 6th BCE).
• According to Scharfe, "his proximity to the Vedic language as found in the Upanishads and Vedic sūtras suggests the 5th or maybe 6th c. B.C."

Location

Salatura

Peshawar

Taxila

Charsadda

Mardan

GANDHARA

Kabul
river

Indus
river

Indus
river

class=notpageimage|

Approximate geographical region of Gandhara centered on the Peshawar Basin, in present-day northwest Pakistan

Nothing certain is known about Pāṇini's personal life. In an inscription of Siladitya VII of Valabhi, he is called Śalāturiya, which means "a man from Salatura". This means Panini lived in Salatura in ancient Gandhara (present day north-west Pakistan), which likely was near Lahor, a town at the junction of the Indus and Kabul rivers. According to the memoirs of the 7th-century Chinese scholar Xuanzang, there was a town called Suoluoduluo on the Indus where Pāṇini was born, and where he composed the Qingming-lun (Sanskrit: Vyākaraṇa).

According to Hartmut Scharfe, Pāṇini lived in Gandhara, close to the borders of the Achaemenid Empire, and Gandāra was then an Achaemenian satrapy following the Achaemenid conquest of the Indus Valley. He must, therefore, have been technically a Persian subject but his work shows no awareness of the Persian language. According to Patrick Olivelle, Pāṇini's text and references to him elsewhere suggest that "he was clearly a northerner, probably from the northwestern region".

Legends and later reception

According to Kathāsaritsāgara legends Pāṇini studied under his guru Varsha in Pataliputra. Not the brightest of his disciples, on the advice of Varsha's wife, Pāṇini went to the Himalayas to do penance and gain knowledge from Shiva. Sutras were granted by Shiva, who danced and played his damaru before Pāṇini and produced the basic sounds of these sutras, Panini accepted them and they are now known as the Shiva Sutras. Armed with this new grammar Pāṇini came back from the Himalayas to Pataliputra. But at the same time, Vararuchi, another disciple of Varsha had learned of a grammar from Indra. They engaged in a debate which lasted eight days and on the last day, with Vararuchi emerging dominant, Pāṇini was able to defeat him with the help of Shiva who destroyed Vararuchi's grammar book. Pāṇini then defeated the rest of Varsha's disciples and emerged as the greatest grammarian.

Pāṇini is believed to have spent the major portion of his life in Pataliputra and according to some pandits, he was born and brought up there, the ancestors of Pāṇini having already moved there from Salatura. Pāṇini, has also been associated with the University of Taxila.

Pāṇini is also mentioned in Indian fables and other ancient texts. The Panchatantra, for example, mentions that Pāṇini was killed by a lion.

According to some historians Pingala was the brother of Pāṇini.

Pāṇini was depicted on a five-rupee Indian postage stamp in August 2004.

Aṣṭādhyāyī

Main article: Aṣṭādhyāyī

The most important of Pāṇini's works, the Aṣṭādhyāyī, is a grammar that essentially defines the Sanskrit language. Modeled on the dialect and register of elite speakers in his time, the text also accounts for some features of the older Vedic language.

The Aṣtādhyāyī is a descriptive and generative grammar with algebraic rules governing every aspect of the language. It is supplemented by three ancillary texts: the akṣarasamāmnāya, dhātupāṭha and gaṇapāṭha.

Growing out of a centuries-long effort to preserve the language of the Vedic hymns from "corruption", the Aṣtādhyāyī is the high point of a vigorous, sophisticated grammatical tradition devised to arrest language change. The Aṣtādhyāyī's preeminence is underlined by the fact that it eclipsed all similar works that came before: while not the first, it is the oldest such text surviving in its entirety.

The Aṣṭādhyāyī consists of 3,959 sūtras in eight chapters, which are each subdivided into four sections or pādas. The text takes material from lexical lists (dhātupāṭha, gaṇapātha) as input and describes the algorithms to be applied to them for the generation of well-formed words. Such is its intricacy that the correct application of its rules and metarules is still being worked out centuries later.

The Aṣṭādhyāyī, composed in an era when oral composition and transmission was the norm, is staunchly embedded in that oral tradition. In order to ensure wide dissemination, Pāṇini is said to have preferred brevity over clarity—it can be recited end-to-end in two hours. This has led to the emergence of a great number of commentaries of his work over the centuries, which for the most part adhere to the foundations laid by Pāṇini's work.

Bhaṭṭikāvya

Main article: Bhaṭṭikāvya

Indian curriculums in the late classical era had at their core a system of grammatical study and linguistic analysis. The core text for this study was the Aṣṭādhyāyī of Pāṇini, the sine qua non of learning. This grammar of Pāṇini had been the object of intense study for the ten centuries prior to the composition of the Bhaṭṭikāvya. It was Bhaṭṭi's purpose to provide a study aid to Pāṇini's text by using the examples already provided in the existing grammatical commentaries in the context of the Rāmāyaṇa. The intention of the author was to teach this advanced science through a relatively easy and pleasant medium. In his own words:

This composition is like a lamp to those who perceive the meaning of words and like a hand mirror for a blind man to those without grammar.

This poem, which is to be understood by means of a commentary, is a joy to those sufficiently learned: through my fondness for the scholar I have here slighted the dullard.

Bhaṭṭikāvya 22.33–34.

Legacy

Pāṇini is known for his text Aṣṭādhyāyī, a sutra-style treatise on Sanskrit grammar, which consists of 3,996 verses or rules on linguistics, syntax and semantics in "eight chapters" which is the foundational text of the Vyākaraṇa branch of the Vedanga, the auxiliary scholarly disciplines of the Vedic period. His aphoristic text attracted numerous bhashya (commentaries), of which the Mahābhāṣya by Patanjali is the most famous. His ideas influenced and attracted commentaries from scholars of other Indian religions such as Buddhism.

Pāṇini's analysis of noun compounds still forms the basis of modern linguistic theories of compounding in Indian languages. Pāṇini's comprehensive and scientific theory of grammar is conventionally taken to mark the start of Classical Sanskrit. His systematic treatise inspired and made Sanskrit the preeminent Indian language of learning and literature for two millennia.

Pāṇini's theory of morphological analysis was more advanced than any equivalent Western theory before the 20th century. His treatise is generative and descriptive, uses metalanguage and meta-rules, and has been compared to the Turing machine wherein the logical structure of any computing device has been reduced to its essentials using an idealized mathematical model.

Modern linguistics

Pāṇini's work became known in 19th-century Europe, where it influenced modern linguistics initially through Franz Bopp. Subsequently, a wider body of work influenced Sanskrit scholars such as Ferdinand de Saussure, Leonard Bloomfield, and Roman Jakobson. Frits Staal (1930–2012) discussed the impact of Indian ideas on language in Europe. After outlining the various aspects of the contact, Staal notes that the idea of formal rules in language – proposed by Ferdinand de Saussure in 1894 and developed by Noam Chomsky in 1957 – has origins in the European exposure to the formal rules of Pāṇinian grammar. In particular, de Saussure, who lectured on Sanskrit for three decades, may have been influenced by Pāṇini and Bhartrihari; his idea of the unity of the signifier-signified in the sign somewhat resembles the notion of Sphoṭa. More importantly, the very idea that formal rules can be applied to areas outside of logic or mathematics may itself have been catalysed by Europe's contact with the work of Sanskrit grammarians.

De Saussure

Pāṇini, and the later Indian linguist Bhartrihari, had a significant influence on many of the foundational ideas proposed by Ferdinand de Saussure, professor of Sanskrit, who is widely considered the father of modern structural linguistics and with Charles S. Peirce on the other side, to semiotics, although the concept Saussure used was semiology. Saussure himself cited Indian grammar as an influence on some of his ideas. In his Mémoire sur le système primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-européennes (Memoir on the Original System of Vowels in the Indo-European Languages) published in 1879, he mentions Indian grammar as an influence on his idea that "reduplicated aorists represent imperfects of a verbal class." In his De l'emploi du génitif absolu en sanscrit (On the Use of the Genitive Absolute in Sanskrit) published in 1881, he specifically mentions Pāṇini as an influence on the work.

Prem Singh, in his foreword to the reprint edition of the German translation of Pāṇini's Grammar in 1998, concluded that the "effect Panini's work had on Indo-European linguistics shows itself in various studies" and that a "number of seminal works come to mind," including Saussure's works and the analysis that "gave rise to the laryngeal theory," further stating: "This type of structural analysis suggests influence from Panini's analytical teaching." George Cardona, however, warns against overestimating the influence of Pāṇini on modern linguistics: "Although Saussure also refers to predecessors who had taken this Paninian rule into account, it is reasonable to conclude that he had a direct acquaintance with Panini's work. As far as I am able to discern upon rereading Saussure's Mémoire, however, it shows no direct influence of Paninian grammar. Indeed, on occasion, Saussure follows a path that is contrary to Paninian procedure."

Leonard Bloomfield

The founding father of American structuralism, Leonard Bloomfield, wrote a 1927 paper titled "On some rules of Pāṇini".

Rishi Rajpopat

Rishi Rajpopat elaborated in 2021 in his PhD thesis a deeper understanding of Panini's "language machine" by designing a simple system of resolving rule conflicts. His thesis has been critiqued as being built upon flawed premises and understanding of rules by prominent Indian Sanskrit scholars.

Comparison with modern formal systems

Pāṇini's grammar is the world's first formal system, developed well before the 19th century innovations of Gottlob Frege and the subsequent development of mathematical logic. In designing his grammar, Pāṇini used the method of "auxiliary symbols", in which new affixes are designated to mark syntactic categories and the control of grammatical derivations. This technique, rediscovered by the logician Emil Post, became a standard method in the design of computer programming languages. Sanskritists now accept that Pāṇini's linguistic apparatus is well-described as an "applied" Post system. Considerable evidence shows ancient mastery of context-sensitive grammars, and a general ability to solve many complex problems. Frits Staal has written that "Panini is the Indian Euclid."

Other works

Two literary works are attributed to Pāṇini, though they are now lost.

• The Jāmbavati Vijaya is a lost epic poem cited by Rajashekhara in Jalhana's Sukti Muktāvalī. A fragment of this work can be found in Ramayukta's commentary on the Namalinganushasana. The title suggests that the work dealt with Krishna's winning of Jambavati from the underworld as his bride. Rajashekhara is quoted thus in Jalhana's Sukti Muktāvalī:

नमः पाणिनये तस्मै यस्मादाविर भूदिह।

आदौ व्याकरणं काव्यमनु जाम्बवतीजयम्॥

namaḥ pāṇinaye tasmai yasmādāvirabhūdiha।

ādau vyākaraṇaṃ kāvyamanu jāmbavatījayam॥

• Ascribed to Pāṇini, the Pātāla Vijaya (Victory in/over the Underworld) is a lost work cited by Namisadhu in his commentary on the Kavyalankara (Poetic Aesthetics) of Rudrata. The Pātāla Vijaya is considered the same work as the Jāmbavati Vijaya by Moriz Winternitz.

There are many proto-mathematical concepts found in Pāṇini's works. Pāṇini came up with a plethora of ideas to organize the known grammatical forms of his day in a systematic way. Like any mathematician who models a known phenomenon in mathematical language, Pāṇini created a metalanguage which is very close to the modern-day ideas of algebra.

See also

• List of Indian mathematicians
• Pingala
• Seṭ and aniṭ roots
• Tolkāppiyam

Bibliography

• Bhate, Saroja; Kak, Subhash (1993). "Panini's Grammar and Computer Science" (PDF). Annals of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute. 72.
• Bod, Rens (2013), A New History of the Humanities: The Search for Principles and Patterns from Antiquity to the Present, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0-19-966521-1
• Bronkhorst, Johannes (2016), How the Brahmins Won: From Alexander to the Guptas, Brill, ISBN 9789004315518
• Bronkhorst, Johannes (2019), A Śabda Reader: Language in Classical Indian Thought, Columbia University Press, ISBN 9780231548311
• Cardona, George (1997) [1976], Pāṇini: A Survey of Research, Motilal Banarsidass, ISBN 978-81-208-1494-3
• Harold G. Coward (1990). Potter, Karl (ed.). The Philosophy of the Grammarians, in Encyclopedia of Indian Philosophies Volume 5. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-81-208-0426-5.
• Carter, George F.; et al. (1979). "On Mundkur on Diffusion". Current Anthropology. 20 (2): 425–428. doi:10.1086/202297. S2CID 143783458.
• Houben, Jan E. M. (2009). "Panini's Grammar and Its Computerization: A Construction Grammar Approach". Sanskrit Computational Linguistics. Springer. pp. 6–25. ISBN 9783540938842.
• François, Alexandre; Ponsonnet, Maïa (2013). "Descriptive linguistics" (PDF). In Jon R. McGee; Richard L. Warms (eds.). Theory in Social and Cultural Anthropology: An Encyclopedia. Vol. 1. SAGE Publications. pp. 184–187. ISBN 9781412999632.
• Ingerman, Peter Zilahy (March 1967). ""Pāṇini-Backus Form" Suggested". Communications of the ACM. 10 (3): 137. doi:10.1145/363162.363165. S2CID 52817672. Ingerman suggests that the then-called Backus normal form be renamed to the Pāṇini–Backus form, to give due credit to Pāṇini as the earliest independent inventor.
• Kadvany, John (8 February 2008). "Positional Value and Linguistic Recursion". Journal of Indian Philosophy. 35 (5–6): 487–520. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.565.2083. doi:10.1007/s10781-007-9025-5. S2CID 52885600.
• Tibor Kiss (2015). Syntax - Theory and Analysis. Walter de Gruyter. ISBN 978-3-11-037740-8.
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Further reading

Works

• Pāṇini. Ashtādhyāyī. Book 4. Translated by Chandra Vasu. Benares, 1896. (in Sanskrit and English)
• Pāṇini. Ashtādhyāyī. Book 6–8. Translated by Chandra Vasu. Benares, 1897. (in Sanskrit and English)

Pāṇini

• O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Pāṇini", MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, University of St Andrews 2000.
• Cardona, George (1988). Pāṇini, His Work and Its Traditions: Background and introduction. Motilal Banarsidass. ISBN 9788120804197.

External links

• Pāṇinian Linguistics
• PaSSim – Paninian Sanskrit Simulator simulates the Pāṇinian Process of word formation
• The system of Panini
• Gaṇakāṣṭādhyāyī, a software on Sanskrit grammar, based on Pāṇini's Sutras
• Ashtadhyayi, Work by Pāṇini
• Forizs, L. Pāṇini, Nāgārjuna and Whitehead – The Relevance of Whitehead for Contemporary Buddhist Philosophy
• The Aṣṭādhyāyī of Pāṇini, with the Mahābhāṣya and Kāśikā commentaries, along with the Nyāsa and Padamanjara commentaries on the Kāśikā. (PDF) Sanskrit.