Panini: the grammar of Sanskrit in four thousand rules
A grammarian from Gandhara describes the language of the Vedas and the learned so fully and tersely that his work has never been surpassed.
Panini, a native of Shalatura in Gandhara in the north-west of India, composes the Ashtadhyayi—the "Eight Chapters": some four thousand short rules describing Sanskrit in full, from sounds to the building of the sentence. The rules are compressed into formulas with abbreviations and refer to one another, so that the whole grammar fits into a text that was learned by heart. Scholars dispute his date: some place Panini in the sixth or fifth century BCE, others around 400; he himself mentions the Greeks, which speaks rather for the later date. From then on the Sanskrit of the learned is the language as Panini described it; his work was expounded by Katyayana and Patanjali, and nineteenth-century European linguistics learned precision from him. In these centuries Judea lives under the Persians; not long before, Ezra had read the Torah to the people.
Sources
Documents of the period
- the Ashtadhyayi of Panini with the commentary of Patanjali — the four thousand rules and the mention of the Greeks
Scholarship
- history of Sanskrit grammar — the dispute over the dating: sixth–fifth century or about 400 BCE
Basis: documents and evidence.