Sanskrit Grammarian Panini.

[Brahmanyan]

Many of us will be surprised if we know the famous grammarian Panini was born in a place called Śalāturiya, which means "man from Salatura". This means Pāṇini lived in Salatura of ancient Gandhara, which was near Lahor (or Chota Lahore), a town at the junction of the Indus and Kabul Rivers, in
the present day in Charsadda, Pakistan, located in Peshawar valley in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province (formerly NWFP). Shalatula, is a town near to modern day Attock on the Indus river, another account says his birth place at Pushkalavati, Gandhara, also in the modern-day Charsadda of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, in Pakistan.

It is cconsidered Panini is the forerunner to the modern formal language theory used in computer languages. Concepts which are fundamental to today's theoretical computer science surprisingly have their origin with Panini. Some scholars say "His sophisticated logical rules and technique have been widely influential in ancient and modern linguistics.”
Though Panini's work "The Ashtadhyayi" was not the first book on Sanskrit grammar, it was improved upon by Panini. The Ashtadhyayi became the foundation of Sanskrit grammar . Panini simplified the rules when the Sanskrit grammar was hard to follow. He also used other references so that need of going for further references was avoided.

Brahmanyan
Bangalore.
(Based on information collected from various internet sources)

[Brahmanyan]

Re: Sanskrit Grammarian Panini.

Well, here is an interesting piece of information I found in the book "The Argumentative Indian" written by Nobel Laureate Dr. Amartya Sen, who suggests Grammarian Panini was of Afghan origin. I give below the relevant portion from his book.

"Despite its quintessential "Indianness" there is a general understanding that, in an early form, Sanskrit came to India from abroad in the second millennium BCE, with
the migration of Indo-Europeans, and then it developed further and
flourished magnificently in India. It is also interesting to note that the
greatest grammarian in Sanskrit (indeed possibly in any language),
namely Panini, who systematized and transformed Sanskrit grammar and phonetics around the fourth century BCE, was of Afghan origin (he describes his village on the banks of the river Kabul). These foreign connections have not diminished the pride of classically minded Indians in that great language, nor in the exceptional achievements of the literature, culture and science that found its expression in Sanskrit"

Brahmanyan
Bangalore.