ABSTRACT
We know very little about the Indian grammarian Pāṇini. He probably lived around 500 Bce, probably in the northwest of the subcontinent in what is now Pakistan. His name has traditionally been associated with a massive corpus known as the Aṣṭādhyāyī (lit. ‘eight chapters’), the earliest extant grammar of Sanskrit. The stunning complexity and finesse of this work set a lasting high-water mark for Indian language scholarship. It has also had significant impact on the study of language in the west.
