Panini's grammar (Ashtadhyayi)
Gramática de Panini (Ashtadhyayi)
- Date
- c. 400 BCE · confidence medium
- Place
- Shalatula, near Attock, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan
- Credited to
- Panini
- Field
- Knowledge & symbols
What it is
Complete description of Sanskrit in about 4,000 chained generative rules, with metarules, auxiliary symbols and an order of application that function as a formal system. It is the first generative grammar and a precedent for formal languages.
Backus-Naur notation (1959-1960) has sometimes been called the 'Panini-Backus form' (Ingerman, 1967) for its resemblance, though there was no direct influence.
What it led to
- Indian linguistics (Katyayana, Patanjali)
- standardisation of Classical Sanskrit
- influence on 19th-century European linguistics (Bopp, Saussure, Bloomfield)