Philology is the study of language in oral and written historical sources; it is the intersection of textual criticism, literary criticism, history, and linguistics. Philology is more commonly defined as the study of literary texts as well as oral and written records, the establishment of their authenticity and their original form, and the determination of their meaning. A person who pursues this kind of study is known as a philologist.
The Prakrits are any of several Middle Indo-Aryan languages formerly used in India.
Linguistics is the scientific study of language. It involves an analysis of language form, language meaning, and language in context.
As the Old Testament was written in Hebrew, Hebrew has been central to Judaism and Christianity for more than 2000 years.
Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit (BHS) is a modern linguistic category applied to the language used in a class of Indian Buddhist texts, such as the Perfection of Wisdom sutras. BHS is classified as a Middle Indo-Aryan language. It is sometimes called "Buddhist Sanskrit" or "Mixed Sanskrit".
Medieval Hebrew was a literary and liturgical language that existed between the 4th and 19th century. It was not commonly used as a spoken language, but mainly in written form by rabbis, scholars and poets. Medieval Hebrew had many features that distinguished it from older forms of Hebrew. These affected grammar, syntax, sentence structure, and also included a wide variety of new lexical items, which were either based on older forms or borrowed from other languages, especially Aramaic, Greek and Latin.
Abū Bishr ʿAmr ibn ʿUthmān ibn Qanbar Al-Baṣrī, known as Sībawayh or Sībawayhi was Persian, a leading grammarian of Basra and author of Arabic linguistics. His famous unnamed work, referred to as Al-Kitāb, or "The Book", is a seminal encyclopedic grammar of the Arabic language.
Śākaṭāyana (814–867) was the name of two Sanskrit grammarians, one who was a predecessor of Yaska and Panini in Iron Age India, and one who was a Sanskrit grammarian.
Vyākaraṇa refers to one of the six ancient Vedangas, ancillary science connected with the Vedas, which are scriptures in Hinduism. Vyākaraṇa is the study of Sanskrit.
The Mahābhāṣya, attributed to Patañjali, is a commentary on selected rules of Sanskrit grammar from Pāṇini's treatise, the Ashtadhyayi, as well as Kātyāyana's Varttika, an elaboration of Pāṇini's grammar. It is dated to the 2nd century BCE.
Pāṇini (पाणिनि) was an ancient Sanskrit philologist, grammarian, and a revered scholar in ancient India. Considered the father of linguistics, Pāṇini likely lived in the northwest Indian subcontinent during the Mahajanapada era. He is said to have been born in Shalatula of ancient Gandhara, which likely was near modern Lahor, a small town at the junction of the Indus and Kabul rivers, which falls in the Swabi District of modern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan.
Nagavarma II was a Kannada language scholar and grammarian in the court of the Western Chalukya Empire that ruled from Basavakalyan, in modern Karnataka state, India. He was the earliest among the three most notable and authoritative grammarians of Old-Kannada language. Nagavarma II's reputation stems from his notable contributions to various genres of Kannada literature including prosody, rhetoric, poetics, grammar and vocabulary. According to the scholar R. Narasimhacharya, Nagavarma II is unique in all of ancient Kannada literature, in this aspect. His writings are available and are considered standard authorities for the study of Kannada language and its growth.
The Aindra school of Sanskrit grammar is one of the eleven schools of Sanskrit grammar mentioned in Pāṇini's Ashtadhyayi. It is named after Indra in allusion to Lord Indra, the king of Gods in Hindu mythology. Arthur Coke Burnell, a renowned orientologist, in his 1875 book, "On the Aindra school of Sanskrit grammars" details this school. Burnell believed that most non-Pāṇinian systems of Sanskrit grammar were traceable to this school of grammar, believed to be the oldest and reputed to be founded by Indra himself.
Sphoṭa is an important concept in the Indian grammatical tradition of Vyakarana, relating to the problem of speech production, how the mind orders linguistic units into coherent discourse and meaning.
Bhartṛhari is a Sanskrit writer to whom are normally ascribed two influential Sanskrit texts:
Abu al-Abbas Ahmad bin Abd al-Rahman bin Muhammad bin Sa'id bin Harith bin Asim al-Lakhmi al-Qurtubi, better known as Ibn Maḍāʾ was an Arab Muslim polymath from Córdoba in Islamic Spain. Ibn Mada was notable for having challenged the traditional formation of Arabic grammar and of the common understanding of linguistic governance among Arab grammarians, performing an overhaul first suggested by Al-Jahiz two-hundred years prior. He is considered the first linguist in history to address the subject of dependency in the grammatical sense in which it is understood today, and was instrumental during the Almohad reforms as chief judge of the Almohad Caliphate.
The Grammarians of Basra were grammarians and language scholars of Basra in the Islamic Golden Age, who laid down the rules of grammar and of literary style, and whose teachings and writings became the canon of the Arabic language. Shortly after the school's foundation in Basra, a rival school was established in Kufa, by the Grammarians of Kufa. The book Kitab al-Fihrist by the tenth century author, Ibn Ishaq al-Warraq, known as "al-Nadim", provides biographical details of the leading figures and is the principal source for early accounts of the two schools. The schools represent the two main branches in the development of Arabic grammar and punctuation, linguistics, philology, Quranic exegesis and recital, Hadith, poetry and literature.
