Johan Frederik "Frits" Staal (3 November 1930 – 19 February 2012) was the department founder and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and South/Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
[3] After earning his doctorate, he served as a lecturer in Sanskrit at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London from 1958 to 1962.
The formal basis for Panini's methods involved the use of "auxiliary" markers, rediscovered in the 1930s by the logician Emil Post.
In 1975, a consortium of scholars, led by Staal, documented the twelve-day performance, in Panjal village, Kerala, of the Vedic Agnicayana ritual, which is available as a documentary titled Altar of Fire.
[8] In Rules without Meaning Staal controversially suggested that mantras "predate language in the development of man in a chronological sense".