Panini (grammarian)

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Pāṇini (पाणिन ; IPA pɑːɳɪn̪ɪ) was an ancient Gandharan grammarian (approximately 5th century BC, but estimates range from the 7th to the 3rd centuries) who is most famous for formulating the 3,959 rules of Sanskrit morphology known as the Aṣṭādhyāyī.

Pāṇini's grammar of Sanskrit is highly systematised and technical. Inherent in its analytic approach are the concepts of the phoneme, the morpheme and the root, only recognized by Western linguists some two millennia later. His rules have a reputation of perfection — that is, they perfectly describe the Sanskrit morphology, and regarded as so clear that computer scientists have made use of them to teach computers to parse Sanskrit. He uses metarules, transformations, and recursion. In this sense he may be considered the father of computing machines. The Backus-Naur Form or BNF grammars used to describe modern programming languages have significant similarities to Pāṇini's grammar rules.

Nothing definite is known about Pāṇini's life, not even the century he lived in (he lived almost certainly after the 7th and before the 3rd century BC). According to tradition, he was born in Shalatula, near the Indus river in the current Pakistan, and lived ca. 520–460 BC, a time probably falling within the late 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, indicating that Vedic Sanskrit was already archaic, but still a comprehensible dialect.

Deities referred to in his work include Vasudeva (4.3.98). The concept of Dharma is attested in his example sentence (4.4.41) dharmam carati "he observes the law".

An important hint for the dating of Pāṇini is the occurrence of yavan- "Greek" in 4.1.49, where the formation of the word yavanānī (either "Greek woman", or "Greek script") is discussed. There would have been no first-hand knowledge of Greeks in India before the conquests of Alexander the Great in the 330s BC, but it is likely that the name was known via Old Persian yauna, so that Pāṇini may well have lived as early as the time of Darius the Great. It is not known whether Pāṇini himself used writing for the composition of his work. Some people argue that a work of such complexity would have been impossible to compile without written notes, while others allow for the possibility that he might have composed it with the help of a group of students whose memories served him as 'notepads'. Writing only appears in South Asia in the form of the Kharoshthi script in the 3rd century BC, so that for some (late) estimates of his lifetime, he could have known and used a writing system.