Pāṇini

Who is Pāṇini?

Pāṇini, or Panini, was a Sanskrit grammarian from ancient India. He was born in Pushkalavati, Gandhara, in the modern-day Charsadda of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan.

Pāṇini is known for his Sanskrit grammar, particularly for his formulation of the 3,959 rules of Sanskrit morphology, syntax and semantics in the grammar known as Ashtadhyayi, the foundational text of the grammatical branch of the Vedanga, the auxiliary scholarly disciplines of Vedic religion [Hinduism] .

The Ashtadhyayi is one of the earliest known grammars of Sanskrit, although Pāṇini refers to previous texts like the Unadisutra, Dhatupatha, and Ganapatha. It is the earliest known work on descriptive linguistics, and together with the work of his immediate predecessors stands at the beginning of the history of linguistics itself. His theory of morphological analysis was more advanced than any equivalent Western theory before the mid 20th century, and his analysis of noun compounds still forms the basis of modern linguistic theories of compounding, which have borrowed Sanskrit terms such as bahuvrihi and dvandva.