Panini's grammar
Sanskrit is described in about 4,000 rules, and the result reads like a formal language.
- When
- Known to
- ± 50 years
- Era
- Classical, Holocene
Panini's Ashtadhyayi, composed around 400 BCE, describes Sanskrit with a system of ordered rules, meta-rules governing rule conflict, and a compressed technical notation — a generative grammar in a recognisably modern sense, produced without writing. It is the most complete description of any language before the twentieth century, and it influenced the development of formal language theory and computer science when Western linguists encountered it.