1817: Pāṇini's Ideas (General Overview) Dec 6, 2019

As discussed before, the linguist Pāṇini was one of the earliest and certainly very influential. To give an idea of some of the work he did, though still very general, he formalized and solved many problems concerning generative morphology i.e. generating new words with different affixes, vowel changes, etc.. He also used ideas now belonging to metaphysics, that is to say he invented many ideas about features of spoken language that are not verbal in order to explain syntax and grammar. His structures were so thorough that the logic of his work has been likened to that of Turing machine, but this was 2,500 years ago.

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