| Ashtadhyayi |
| Definition: This treatise is a sixth-century-BCE Sanskrit grammar compiled by Panini. It contains 3,959 rules (aka sutras) of Sanskrit morphology, and it is the earliest known Sanskrit grammar. It is also the earliest known work of descriptive and generative linguistics – i.e., it describes how Sanskrit was spoken and it give rules for creating properly formed Sanskrit sentences. |
| Example:
The first 2 of the 3,959 sutras are: 1.1.1: the technical term vrddih denotes the phonemes {a, ai, au}. 1.1.2: the technical term guṇa denotes the phonemes {a, e, o}. |
| Etymology: The name means "eight chapters" in Sanskrit. |