The Encyclopedia of language and linguistics

Abstract

Pān.ini’s grammar (ca. 500 B.C.) seeks to provide a complete, maximally concise, and theoretically consistent analysis of Sanskrit grammatical structure. It is the foundation of all traditional and modern analyses of Sanskrit, as well as having great historical and theoretical interest in its own right. Western grammatical theory has been influenced by it at every stage of its development for the last two centuries. The early 19th century comparativists learned from it the principles of morphological analysis. Bloomfield modeled both his classic Algonquian grammars and the logical-positivist axiomatization of his Postulates on it. Modern linguistics acknowledges it as the most complete generative grammar of any language yet written, and continues to adopt technical ideas from it. The grammar is based on the spoken language (bhās.ā) of Pān.ini’s time, and also gives rules on Vedic usage and on regional variants. Its optional rules distinguish between preferable and marginal forms, and a few rules even have sociolinguistic conditions. It is entirely synchronic: variants are simply