[Panini, the ‘father of linguistics’, in a 2004 stamp issued by the Govt of India]
the word Sanskrit means "complete" or "perfect" and it was thought of as the divine language or the language of the gods.
The great Maharishi Panini was a Sanskrit grammarian who gave a comprehensive and scientific theory of phonetics, phonology, and morphology. Sanskrit was the classical literary language of the Indian Hindus and Panini is considered the founder of the language and literature.
Nothing certain is known about Panini's personal life. According to later traditions, his mother's name was Daksi and his maternal uncle's name was Vyadi. Some scholars suggest that his brother's name was Pingala. Still, less is known about his father, whose name may have been Paṇi, but most scholars reject this suggestion. More than a thousand years after the fact, the Panchatantra mentions that the Grammarian Panini was killed by a lion :
सिंहो व्याकरणस्य कर्तुरहरत् प्राणान् मुनेः पाणिनेः ।
simho vyakaranasya karturaharat pranan muneh panineh |
Ashtadhyayi (“Eight Chapters”):
Ashtadhyayi, Sanskrit Aṣṭādhyāyī (“Eight Chapters”), This work set the linguistic standards for Classical Sanskrit. It sums up in 4,000 sutras the science of phonetics and grammar that had evolved in the Vedic religion
Written more than 2,000 years ago, the ‘Ashtadhyayi’ is a linguistic text that set the standard for how Sanskrit was meant to be written and spoken.
The discovery now makes it possible to construct millions of Sanskrit words using Panini’s system—and since his grammar rules were exact and formulaic, they can act as a Sanskrit language algorithm that can be taught to computers.
` [Example photo of rules, provided by Cambridge]
No comments:
Post a Comment