It is the foundation of all traditional and modern analyses of Sanskrit, as well as having great historical and theoretical interest in its own right. Western grammatical theory has been influenced by it at every stage of its development for the last two centuries. The early 19th century comparativists learned from it the principles of morphological analysis. Bloomfield modeled both his classic Algonquian grammars and the logical-positivist axiomatization of his Postulates on it. Modern linguistics acknowledges it as the most complete (...) generative grammar of any language yet written, and continues to adopt technical ideas from it. (shrink)

persusasions are in addition impressed by its remarkable conciseness, and by the rigorous consistency with which it deploys its semi-formalized metalanguage, a grammatically and lexically regimented form of Sanskrit. Empiricists like Bloomfield also admired it for another, more specific reason, namely that it is based on nothing but very general principles such as simplicity, without prior commitments to any scheme of “universal grammar”, or so it seems, and proceeds from a strictly synchronic perspective. Generative linguists for their part have marveled (...) especially at its ingenious technical devices, and at intricate system of conventions governing rule application and rule interaction that it presupposes, which seem to uncannily anticipate ideas of modern linguistic theory (if only because many of them were originally borrowed from P¯. (shrink)