[9][10] Cardona was credited by Mohammad Hamid Ansari, the vice president of India, for making the University of Pennsylvania a "center of Sanskrit learning in North America",[11] along with Professors W. Norman Brown, Ludo Rocher, Ernest Bender, Wilhelm Halbfass, and several other Sanskritists.
[6]: ix [8]: 261 [12] Cardona's PhD was in linguistics with a specialization in Indo-European ‒ by this time he had already begun studying Sanskrit grammar (vyākaraṇa) and related areas (especially nyāya and mīmāṃsā).
[10] In 1962–63, Cardona went to Gujarat state, India, where he worked on his A Gujarati reference grammar, as well as furthering his understanding of Sanskrit and Indian grammatical tradition.
[8]: 259, 269 Cardona entered the scene of indological studies at the closing of a disciplinary era dominated by the legacies of Bopp, Whitney, and Bloomfield ‒ which triad of thinkers had established a discipline that relied less upon, and on occasion pointedly opposed,[28]: 6–7 native Indian tradition itself, in order to accomplish overtly historical and comparative objectives.
[29]: 507 On the whole, Cardona has been widely recognized as a champion of the indology that seeks an interior ‒ if not a simply historical ‒ understanding of the intentions and aims of Indian grammarians.
[6]: xi [30][13]: 504 [8]: 269 This is evidenced, for instance, by Cardona's sometimes unorthodox commitment to interpreting Indian grammatical treatises in line with the traditional treatment of the munitraya (lit.
[31]: 59 [19]: 164, 165 [28]: 9 Moreover, concerning his work on the Aṣṭādhyāyī, Cardona has contributed to an ongoing debate as to how the design of Pāṇini's grammar ought to be conceptualized: in terms of modern linguistic insight; the native exegetical tradition; or some fusion of the two.
While scholars of previous generations ‒ such as Albrecht Weber, Bruno Liebich, and Sylvain Lévi ‒ did not shy away from making claims about dating these texts, Cardona summed up the prevailing contemporary sentiment when he concluded: 'non liquet' (Latin for 'it is not clear').
[28]: 21 Cardona's reasoning for this derives from the nature of the Aṣṭādhyāyī and other grammatical compositions themselves: especially for the former (which was designed to be memorized), the structure of these texts prioritizes economical exposition and so they read more like a series of mathematical formulas than spoken prose.
Rocher identified the central concern of this field when she observed (writing in 1975) that Cardona's then in-progress Panini: His Work and Its Traditions (1988, 1997) would "reflect the fact that present day research is essentially [tied up] with methodology.
This stands in contrast to the perspective held by his direct teacher, Paul Thieme, who argued that technical terms have a "single interpretation" and that their meaning remains consistent across commentaries and grammars.
In his article, Studies in Indian Grammarians, I: The method of description reflected in the śivasūtras, Cardona discusses the metalanguage employed therein and how it accomplishes Pāṇini's methodological aim, namely, economy.
Harald Millonig, for instance, appraises Cardona's study of the śivasūtras as more or less comprehensive, but ultimately deficient in its attention to detail, particularly with regard to the relationships between the text and the pratyāhāra-sūtras.
Buiskool (1934)[35] and Barend Faddegon (1936)[36] were well aware that Pāṇinian methodology exercised abbreviation for the sake of insinuating functionality into and expressing generalization in grammatical treatment.
[29]: 503 An additional area of controversy relevant to the study of Pāṇini's method of linguistic description that has attracted Cardona's attention is how grammar relates to logic.
Whereas Al-George's supplies extraneous elements to his analysis of the kārakas (he invokes European structuralism), Cardona's position is rooted in Pāṇini's text itself.
Since formalizing Pāṇinian rules also amounts to translating them into a different language,[28]: 37 so to speak, scholars such as Cardona explored the issue of how ‒ or even whether ‒ comparisons of this sort could be carried out.
As a consequence, Staal maintains, scholars ought to aim at "a detailed understanding of Indian grammatical methods",[29]: 506 insofar as that aids assessing Pāṇini as a linguist.
The criterion of scholars such as Staal, on the other hand, permits the incorporation of elements of general linguistic theory into formalizations on the basis of expediency.
[28]: 37 Other scholars hold the view ‒ which Cardona rejects outright as uncritical ‒ that Western grammatical terms on concepts can be directly imposed onto Indian ones.
Durbin, for instance, claims that Cardona's A Gujarati Reference Grammar inadequately meets the author's own goals of serving 1) as an audio-lingual textbook for students, being "too sketchy, ill-organized, and defective"[38]: 412 and 2) as a resource for linguists in Indic studies (Durbin claims this work would actually be more useful for the amateur needing a general grammatical overview of an Indo-Aryan language).
The latter, on the other hand, cover idiosyncratic changes such as isolated Greek examples of vowel harmony: Attic Korkura from Kerkura 'name of an island', or kromuon beside kremuon 'leek'.
[43] Cardona's attempts to maintain that Latin forms like dixti are instances of haplology-as-regular-sound-change[40]: 141 are ultimately sized up by Szemerényi as "mere postulate[s], contradicted by facts".
[29] However, Cardona has concerned himself with the textual and historically explanatory aims of these approaches ‒ which were, in fact, the goals of earlier philological indology ‒ only insofar as they have enabled him to recover and uncover the linguistic science itself encoded in texts like Pāṇini's Aṣṭādhyāyī.
In other words, textual analysis and historical explanation are incidental to Cardona's central priority to treat Pāṇini as an Indian linguist.
As fidelity to the tradition figures prominently for Cardona, he has been mostly critical of attempts to compare Pāṇini and the Pāṇinīyas with modern Western grammatical notions.