01Fourteen sounds from the damaru
The grammar begins with fourteen short lines of sounds, ‘a i u n, ri lri k…’, the Maheshvara Sutras. The tradition, recorded in the Nandikeshvara Kashika, says that at the end of his tandava Mahadev struck his damaru fourteen times and these sounds came out; Panini, who had done tapas, heard them and built his grammar on them. The last letter of each line is a marker, so that a sound and a marker together name a whole class: ‘ac’ means all vowels, ‘hal’ all consonants. With such devices, eight chapters cover the entire spoken and Vedic language.
02A grammar like a machine
Panini’s rules work in order, with meta-rules that decide which rule wins when two apply. Linguists compare the system to a formal grammar of the kind used in computing; the Backus–Naur notation for programming languages has been called Panini–Backus form for that reason. The Ashtadhyayi also preserves names of janapadas, rivers, coins and gotras of his time. Katyayana added vartikas to it, and Patanjali wrote the Mahabhashya on both. The three are honoured together as the munitraya.
