Panini’s Grammatik

Otto Bohtlingk was one of the greatest, it not the greatest Indologists of the nineteenth century. This was Bohtlingk’s first publication which appeared in 1839-40 in two volumes. The present edition, combining those two volumes, contains Panini’s sutras accompanied by a German translation and notes, and the Dhatupatha and GAnapatha along with other useful indices. The Astadhyayi of Panini is even today very hard to follow, and was in Bohtlingk’s time an extremely challenging text. It was a pioneering work and it ought to have been evaluated in that spirit. As stated by Renou (1969), Bohtlingk’s edition of the Astadhyayi was considered the standard edition in Europe. It was responsible for what might be called a ‘revolution’ in linguistic thinking both in Indo-European linguistics as well as in general linguistics. The investigation of Sanskrit grammar proved to be a stimulus for the study of the history of Indo-European languages. It was realized for the first time in the history of linguistics that a word could be neatly broken into root, stem-forming suffix and desinence. Bohtlingk’s was the first standard text and continued to be used until new editions with detailed exegetical explanations came into being.

Review(s)

About the Author(s)