Panini
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- Panini redirects here. For other uses, see Panini (disambiguation).
Pāṇini (पाणिनि; IPA [pɑːɳɪn̪ɪ]) was an ancient Indian grammarian (traditionally 520–460 BC, but estimates range from the 7th to 4th centuries BC) who lived in Gandhara and is most famous for his Sanskrit grammar, particularly for his formulation of the 3,959 rules of Sanskrit morphology in the grammar known as Aṣṭādhyāyī "the eight chapters". Panini's grammar is conventionally taken to mark the end of the period of Vedic Sanskrit, by definition introducing Classical Sanskrit.
Date
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 Gandhara (now in Pakistan), and lived circa 520–460 BC. His grammar defines Classical Sanskrit, so that Pāṇini per definition lived at the end of the 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.An important hint for the dating of Pāṇini is the occurrence of the word yavanānī (in 4.1.49, either "Greek woman", or "Greek script"). There would have been no first-hand knowledge of Greeks in Gandhara 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 (ruled 521 BC–485/6 BC).
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 first appears in India in the form of the 2002.
See also
- List of linguists
- Pingala (Brother of Pāṇini according to some traditions. Mathematician credited for first use of binary numbers, Fibonacci sequence and Pascal's triangle.)
External links
- [Pāṇini's Ashtadhyayi] in ITRANSliteration and devanagari script
- [Software] based on Pāṇini's Sanskrit Grammar
- [Indian Logic and Ontology. A Survey of Contemporary Studies]
- [Traditional Knowledge Systems]
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