Pini (Paperback)

High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Pini was an Ancient Indian Sanskrit grammarian from Pushkalavati, Gandhara (fl. 4th century BCE).He is known for his Sanskrit grammar, particularly for his formulation of the 3,959 rules of Sanskrit morphology in the grammar known as Ashtadhyayi, the foundational text of the grammatical branch of the Vedanga, the auxiliary scholarly disciplines of Vedic religion.The Ashtadhyayi is one of the earliest known grammars of Sanskrit, although he refers to previous texts like the Unadisutra, Dhatupatha, and Ganapatha. It is the earliest known work on descriptive linguistics, generative linguistics, and together with the work of his immediate predecessors (Nirukta, Nighantu, Pratishakyas) stands at the beginning of the history of linguistics itself.Pini's comprehensive and scientific theory of grammar is conventionally taken to mark the end of the period of Vedic Sanskrit, by definition introducing Classical Sanskrit.