Panini (scholar)
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Template:Unicode (Devanāgarī पाणिनि; IPA ) was an ancient Hindu Indian grammarian (approximately 5th century BC, but estimates range from the 7th to the 3rd centuries) who is most famous for formulating the 3,959 rules of Sanskrit morphology known as the [[Ashtadhyayi|]].
Template:Unicode grammar of Sanskrit is highly systematised and technical. Inherent in its analytic approach are the concepts of the phoneme, the morpheme and the root, only recognized by Western linguists some two millennia later. His rules have a reputation of perfection — that is, they perfectly describe the Sanskrit morphology, and regarded as so clear that computer scientists have made use of them to teach computers to understand Sanskrit. He uses metarules, transformations, and recursion. In this sense he may be considered the father of computing machines. The Backus-Naur Form or BNF grammars used to describe modern programming languages have significant similarities to Template:Unicode grammar rules.
Nothing definite is known about Template:Unicode life, not even the century he lived in (he lived almost certainly after the 7th and before the 3rd century BC). According to Indian tradition, he was born in Shalatula, near the Indus river in present-day Pakistan, and lived ca. 520–460 BC, a time probably falling within the late 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.
Deities referred to in his work include Vasudeva (4.3.98). The concept of Dharma is attested in his example sentence (4.4.41) dharmam carati "he observes the law".
An important hint for the dating of Template:Unicode is the occurrence of yavan- "Ionian, Greek" in 4.1.49, where the formation of the word yavanānī (either "Greek woman", or "Greek script") is discussed. It is not known whether Template:Unicode 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 only appears in India in the form of the Brahmi script in the 3rd century BC, so that for some estimates of his lifetime, he could have known and used a writing system.
See also
- Indian mathematicians
- Pingala (Brother of Panini according to some traditions. Mathematician credited for first use of binary numbers, Fibonacci series and Pascal's triangle.)
External links
- Template:Unicode Ashtadhyayi (http://sanskrit.gde.to/doc_z_misc_major_works/) in ITRANSliteration and devanagari script
- Software (http://www.taralabalu.org/panini/) based on Template:Unicode Sanskrit Grammar
- Entry (http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Panini.html) at the MacTutor History of Mathematics archive
- The Influence of Panini on Indian Culture (http://www.personal.psu.edu/users/b/i/bis107/panini2.txt) by Shaina Bal
de:Panini (Grammatiker) fr:Pānini sv:Panini ja:パーニニ sa:पाणिनि