Annotating and Analyzing the Aṣṭādhyāyī

The paper introduces the new research project ‘Aṣṭādhyāyī 2.0’ that aims at developing a digital edition of the Aṣṭādhyāyī Pāṇini’s nearly 2,500 years old grammar of Sanskrit, the ancient Indian language. For modern linguists this grammar is interesting for two reasons. First, its Western (re-)discovery in the 19th century had an enormous influence on contemporary linguistics. For example, the Indologist Maurice Bloomfield wrote about the grammar: “The descriptive grammar of Sanskrit, which Pāṇini brought to its perfection, is one of the greatest monuments of human intelligence and an indispensable model for the description of languages.” (Bloomfield 1929). This admiration is mainly due to the fact that Pāṇini made use of many modern linguistic concepts such as thematic roles, abstract derivation levels, and rewrite rules. Second, the Aṣṭādhyāyī uses sophisticated formal techniques to encode the rule system of the grammar in text form. In this way, the Aṣṭādhyāyī, though written in Sanskrit, can be interpreted as a compiled code of the grammatical system of Sanskrit. It is generally assumed that Pāṇini aimed at a compilation that maximizes compactness and conciseness by making use of inheritance structures, a sophisticated meta-language, and a marker system (Staal, 2006). Modern linguists could benefit from a deep study of Pāṇini’s precise description and concise encoding methods, but regularly lack the ability of understanding the original Sanskrit text. Therefore, modern Western investigations have been based mainly on translations