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4. SANSKRIT
Panini was born in Shalatula, a town near to Attock on the Indus River in present day Pakistan. The dates given for Panini are pure guesses. Experts give various dates in the 4th, 5th, 6th and 7th century BC and there is also no agreement among historians about his date or to the extent of the work with which he is honored.
Panini was a grammarian trying to refine existing languages (to make a "Sanskrit" language), 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. The word "Sanskrit" means "refined" - it is refined from some raw material language. A treatise called Astadhyayi (or Astaka) is Panini's major work. It consists of eight chapters, each subdivided into quarter chapters. In this work, Panini distinguishes between the language of sacred texts and the usual language of communication. Panini gives formal production rules and definitions to describe Sanskrit grammar. Starting with about 1700 basic elements like nouns, verbs, vowels, consonants he put them into classes. The construction of sentences, compound nouns etc. is explained as ordered rules operating on underlying structures in a manner similar to modern theory. In many ways, Panini's constructions are similar to the way that a mathematical function is defined today.
There is no means of knowing the date of Panini. The references to existing authors (there are ten of them) does not give any indication since we do not know about those authors. that Panini per definition lived at the end of the 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. An important hint for the dating of Panini is the occurrence of the word yavanānī (in 4.1.49, either "Greek woman", or "Greek script") There would have been no first-hand knowledge of Greeks in Gandhara before the conquests of Alexander the Great in the 330s BC. Aside from the more abstract considerations of long-distance artistic or philosophical influence, the concrete evidence we have for direct contact between Greeks and Indians is largely limited to the period between the third century BCE and first century CE.", ('Hellenistic India' by Rachel R. Mairs, University of Cambridge) He mentions documents which he has referred as Greek (Yavanani). These would place him after the invasion of Alexander the great when India came in direct contact with the Greek. He certainly lived after Buddha because of his reference to Dharma. How long after that is still a problem. In general, the any attempt to date Panini is just pure conjecture. He could have lived well after the first century AD. Panini's dating and the complete grammatical structure is important in the Sanskrit history since Classical Sanskrit is normally dated from Panini.
It is not certain whether Panini used writing for the composition of his work, though it is generally agreed that he did use a form of writing, based on references to words such as "script" and "scribe" in
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