His work formally codified Classical Sanskrit as a refined and standardized language, making use of a technical metalanguage consisting of a syntax, morphology and lexicon, organised according to a series of meta-rules.
"[5] According to Bronkhorst, there is no reason to doubt the validity of Von Hinüber's and Falk's argument, setting the terminus post quem[note 3] for the date of Pāṇini at 350 BCE or the decades thereafter.
[18] According to Bronkhorst, ...thanks to the work carried out by Hinüber (1990:34-35) and Falk (1993: 303-304), we now know that Pāṇini lived, in all probability, far closer in time to the period of Aśoka than had hitherto been thought.
[note 4] Pāṇini cites at least ten grammarians and linguists before him: Āpiśali, Kāśyapa, Gārgya, Gālava, Cākravarmaṇa, Bhāradvāja, Śākaṭāyana, Śākalya, Senaka, Sphoṭāyana and Yaska.
[31] Cardona offers an earlier date for Pāṇini,[32] by arguing the compound word yavanānī, discussed in sutra 4.1.49, instead of referring to a writing (lipi) c.q.
"Buddhist nuns", could also refer to Jain Aryika, of unknown origin, possibly permitting Pāṇini to be placed before the, 5th century BCE, Gautama Buddha.
[32] Others, based on Panini's linguistic style, date his works to the sixth or fifth century BCE, as: Nothing certain is known about Pāṇini's personal life.
[citation needed] This means Panini lived in Salatura in ancient Gandhara (present day north-west Pakistan), which likely was near Lahor, a town at the junction of the Indus and Kabul rivers.
[note 7][37][38] According to the memoirs of the 7th-century Chinese scholar Xuanzang, there was a town called Suoluoduluo on the Indus where Pāṇini was born, and where he composed the Qingming-lun (Sanskrit: Vyākaraṇa).
[B][54] Modeled on the dialect and register of elite speakers in his time, the text also accounts for some features of the older Vedic language.
The text takes material from lexical lists (dhātupāṭha, gaṇapātha) as input and describes the algorithms to be applied to them for the generation of well-formed words.
[74] His treatise is generative and descriptive, uses metalanguage and meta-rules, and has been compared to the Turing machine wherein the logical structure of any computing device has been reduced to its essentials using an idealized mathematical model.
Subsequently, a wider body of work influenced Sanskrit scholars such as Ferdinand de Saussure, Leonard Bloomfield, and Roman Jakobson.
[76] In particular, de Saussure, who lectured on Sanskrit for three decades, may have been influenced by Pāṇini and Bhartrihari; his idea of the unity of the signifier-signified in the sign somewhat resembles the notion of Sphoṭa.
More importantly, the very idea that formal rules can be applied to areas outside of logic or mathematics may itself have been catalysed by Europe's contact with the work of Sanskrit grammarians.
In his Mémoire sur le système primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-européennes (Memoir on the Original System of Vowels in the Indo-European Languages) published in 1879, he mentions Indian grammar as an influence on his idea that "reduplicated aorists represent imperfects of a verbal class."
In his De l'emploi du génitif absolu en sanscrit (On the Use of the Genitive Absolute in Sanskrit) published in 1881, he specifically mentions Pāṇini as an influence on the work.
George Cardona, however, warns against overestimating the influence of Pāṇini on modern linguistics: "Although Saussure also refers to predecessors who had taken this Paninian rule into account, it is reasonable to conclude that he had a direct acquaintance with Panini's work.
[clarification needed] This technique, rediscovered by the logician Emil Post, became a standard method in the design of computer programming languages.
Considerable evidence shows ancient mastery of context-sensitive grammars, and a general ability to solve many complex problems.
[88][89] Like any mathematician who models a known phenomenon in mathematical language, Pāṇini created a metalanguage which is very close to the modern-day ideas of algebra.