Panini

The Ashtadhyayi describes the whole of Sanskrit in just under four thousand rules, and the reason it is still studied is the engineering rather than the coverage. It opens with a set of sound groupings arranged so that any needed class of letters can be named by taking its first member and a marker, which lets a rule refer to a category in two syllables instead of listing it. It has rules about rules, governing how far a heading extends and which rule wins where two apply. Its default is that a more specific statement overrides a more general one, and that a later one overrides an earlier one, so the ordering of the text is itself part of the content.

Nothing about it is written to be browsed. It is composed to be memorised and recited, and brevity is pursued to the point where saving a single syllable is a recognised achievement in the commentary tradition. The result behaves less like a description than like a procedure: given a meaning and a set of elements, the rules apply in order and a correct form comes out. Linguists in the twentieth century, meeting it after developing formal grammars of their own, found a system they could recognise, composed at least two thousand years before them, and its structure is still argued over as a technical object rather than only as a historical one.

Grammar is one of the six Vedangas, the limbs of the Veda, alongside phonetics, metre, etymology, ritual procedure and astronomy. Those disciplines exist because of a specific conviction about how the Veda works: that its power lies in exact sound, that a mantra recited with the wrong accent or the wrong sandhi does not merely fail but can turn against the reciter, and that the text must therefore be transmitted without drift across centuries in which the spoken language moves on. The elaborate memorisation techniques, in which the same text is recited word by word, in pairs and in reversed sequences, exist for the same reason. Panini gave that concern its most rigorous instrument by making correctness statable rather than only inherited.

Indian tradition places him in the north west and tells that the sound groupings at the head of his work were given to him by Shiva, who beat them out on his drum at the end of a dance. The later commentaries, above all Patanjali great commentary, turned the grammar into a subject of philosophy in its own right, and the schools that grew from it took up questions about how a word carries meaning and whether meaning attaches to the sentence as a whole that occupied Indian philosophy for the next fifteen hundred years.