Panini (grammarian)

Modern statue of Pānaini dressed in the Mogul Empire style (XVII-XIX century) at the University of Benarez.

Pāṇini (Shalatura, fl. 4th century BCE) was an eminent Sanskrit grammarian of ancient India. Arguably the most celebrated and frequently cited of the ancient grammarians of India.

Life

Pāṇini lived in Gandhara, after the time of the Buddha (420–368 BCE) and before the first mention of Pāṇini's death (by a lion), in the Pancha-tantra (circa 200 BC). He is considered an inspired muni ('thinker', being mauná: 'silence').

The form Pāṇini, is the AITS transcription of the form पाणिनि (in Devanagari script). The commonly accepted pronunciation is /pɑːˈɳini/. The term Pāṇini is normally interpreted as '[descendant] of Pāṇina', according to the Aṣṭādhyāyī 4.1.95. Pāṇina means '[descendant] of Pāṇin', (Ashta-adhiaia, 6.4.165),Pāṇin is the name of a family from the Kauśika tribe, according to the Jari-vamsa and the Vishnu-purana.

He was called Daksheia (son of lady Dakshí). His grandfather was called Devala. Pāṇini was also called Shalaturíia (śālāturīya): 'a native of Shalatura', a village on the right bank of the Indus River, in northwestern India, near Attock and Peshawar, in the present-day Pakistani province of Jiber Pakhtunjua.

Works

Pāṇini's most important work was the Asta-adhiai ('eight chapters'). Several others are attributed to him (although they were possibly written by other authors, who used the pen name "Pāṇini" to give authority to his works):

• Dhatu-patha
• Win-patha
• Linga-anushasana
• Shiksa

Before Pāṇini

Pāṇini's grammar describes a more evolved Sanskrit variant of the one used in the writing of the Rig-veda (the oldest text in India, dating from approximately the middle of the 2nd millennium B.C.). The language Pāṇini describes is often called "classical Sanskrit" while the language used in the similar Rig-Veda though with some slightly different dialectal features is called "Vedic Sanskrit" or simply "Vedic". According to the grammatical tradition of ancient India, speech (vach) is an important concept in Vedic hymns, which claim that Brijaspati, the "owner of the sacred word", "named" them. to things".

The linguistic tradition of ancient India does not consider all languages on an equal footing, as it would in modern linguistics. In this tradition, Sanskrit, a language called “perfect” ("saṃskṛtam" bhaṣa) is opposed to Prakrit (prakṛta 'natural, ordinary, unpolished', a set of colloquial variants that are innovative and less conservative than the archaizing classical Sanskrit). Pāṇini's Sanskrit seems to be a written language standardization based on a language prior to Prakrit, whose first testimonies go back more than a thousand years before our era. It is believed that people stopped speaking Sanskrit in the 3rd century BCE. C. ―the time in which the fundamental epic and mythological texts Mahābhārata and Ramayana— were composed and were replaced by the Pracritic languages, which imposed the deciphering and translation of the texts (mythical or religious) from a dead language: such deciphering of a poetry that was no longer said gave rise to Pāṇini's grammar.

Pāṇini's grammar is descriptive in nature, and this is where it differs from the Greek and subsequent grammars.

Pāṇini's Grammar

Pāṇini's most famous work, the Astadhiai, is so called because it consists of eight lessons (adhyaya). The relatively recent text compiles the threat of previous linguistic theories, transmitted orally. There is a reason for the admiration of modern philologists, since he reached a perfection in linguistic analysis that was only surpassed a century ago. Pāṇini is commonly believed to have composed his work between the 4th and 3rd centuries BCE. c.

Pāṇini's grammar definitively fixed the composition of Sanskrit grammar. It consists of some 4,000 remarkably concise aphorisms, called sutra. These rules have the particularity of being ordered cyclically, in such a way, for example, that any of them is based on the immediately preceding one and is also a support for the following one. The rules are preceded by a catalog of Sanskrit sounds and divided into fourteen groups. Along with the corpus of rules, and as auxiliary elements, there are two catalogues, one of roots and another of nominal bases.

This brevity is achieved by the invention of a kind of algebraic notation system not found outside of grammatical schools. The system is so peculiar that it is not likely that it could have been invented by one man and immediately imposed on all his colleagues. It is evidently the result of several centuries of grammatical studies and for this reason Pāṇini must be considered as the final redactor of the grammar, which prevailed over the previous viakarana (traditional Sanskrit grammar) for its greater comprehension and accuracy.. In fact, in the text Pāṇini cites some 64 grammarians who preceded him, which demonstrates the antiquity of this science among the Indians and the extent of its study.

Pāṇini used the traditional system of chained sutras or aphorisms to help students' memory since the introduction in those times was oral and therefore a mnemonic system was imposed.

Character of Pāṇini's Grammar

Pāṇini's plan differs entirely from that commonly adopted in modern grammars, which tend to accommodate parts of speech. As the work is written in the form of aphorisms that had to be learned by heart, the author's main concern is to reduce the work of memory to a minimum. To achieve its objective, it groups together all the cases that present the same phonetic or morphological characteristics, whether or not they belong to the same part of the sentence. What is most striking about the linguistic model is the mastery with which they analyze the constitutive elements of language.

There is a concern of the linguist for the morphology of the Sanskrit language. The nominal and verbal bases, the roots and the affixes and the way in which these are introduced by means of rules, are aspects that are the responsibility of this branch of linguistics.

Each word resolves into its component elements, which are ending, theme with its different derivatives, and root. The root is the most important. To roots (dhatu, foundation) with essentially verbal significance, all words are reduced as much as possible. Root is the irreducible element common to all the words of the same semantic family. The stem is constituted by the root plus one or more determined elements or morphemes that allow the immediate insertion of the inflectional elements. These abstract concepts used for linguistic analysis by Indian grammarians were unknown to European philology and were incorporated into it by Franz Bopp.

Linguistics owes Pāṇini the presentation of the morpheme zero (0). He lucidly warned Hindi that there are linguistic forms that lack a phonological representation, at least in their surface structure. For example, the Spanish form lunes, lacks by itself the morphological characteristic of the plural number. To get around the problem Pāṇini suggested placing the morpheme 0 where the mark was missing like this:

(plural) Monday + 0

(plural) sheep + 0

The successors of Pāṇini

Pāṇini's grammar sutras were completed by his successors. Katyayana, author of an extensive collection of critical notes on the work of Pāṇini, called Vartika, deserves a mention. These notes are as brief as the sutras they comment on. They were joined by Patanjali's Mahabhashya (circa 2nd century B.C.). There are many other later grammatical works, but all of them are derived from the brilliant work of Pāṇini.

Pāṇini's grammar was translated in Europe between 1815 and 1840 by Otto von Böhtlingk (1815-1904) and whose French edition was carried out by Louis Renou (1896-1966), surprising for its precision in the formulations, which refer to both to the phonic organization and to the morphology of the Sanskrit language.

Renou (Etudes vèdiques et paniniennes) commenting on this paragraph, thinks along with Geldner and Strauss that it is about the transcendental part of language, what was later called brahman and of which it is said that, as it happens with Vach or Vak, "man is not in a state to recognize more than a minimal part". In the first place, observing with Renou, one notices the close relationship between grammar and ritual in Sanskrit. Although the grammatical cases do not carry special designations, they are marked with numerical indices, (prathama). This type of indication would come from a ritual in which various notions (days, rites, musical modes, etc.) were evoked by means of ordinals.

Death

According to the Pancha-tantra (circa 200 BC), Pāṇini was killed by a lion.

The text, which in some reviews appears as 2.33, reads:

simho viakaranasia kartur ajarat pranan priian paninej /

mimamsakritam unmamamatha sajasa jasti munim jaiminim //

chando-gñana-nidhim jaghana makaro sail /

agñana-vrita-chetasam atirusham ko arthas tirascham gunaij //

A lion took the life of the beloved grammar Pānaini, an elephant crushed Yaimini, the creator of [the doctrine] mimamsa, Pingala was killed by a crocodile: what do the academic achievements of the insensitive animals matter?

That text is sometimes attributed to Vallabha Deva.

Manuscript written in Panini's birch bark in Sanskrit, written by a Buddhist monk of the current Sri Laka in 1663 (Wellcome Images).

Panini Keyboard for Cell Phones

Pānaini keyboard displayed on the screen of a mobile phone.

Panini keyboard is an innovative mobile phone keyboard, which allows you to type a text message in any Indian regional dialect or any international language with great ease. It uses statistical predictive typing, but without using a dictionary.

Another Pāṇini

There is an ancient poet named Pāṇini, possibly from before the Common Era, who some identify with the grammarian.