1816: Pāṇini Dec 5, 2019

While 'linguistics' as a term is fairly new, it's been going on since at least the 4th century BCE, if not earlier. The most famous linguist at the time would almost certainly be Pāṇini, not to be confused with the food, who was an Indian philologist and grammarian. Indeed, many of the ideas that he formalized, or at least codified, are still in use, or heavily influenced modern thinking. Some argue that his models for generative and morphology were more advanced than anything in the West until the 20th century. There will be more on this tomorrow.

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