Practice question · True or false
Pāṇini's grammar of Sanskrit uses a formal metalanguage with ordered rules and abbreviation conventions.
Hints
- Consider why twentieth-century linguists recognised it so quickly.
- It is organised as about four thousand ordered rules.
Show the answer
True
Why
True, and the recognition was immediate when generative grammarians encountered it: rule ordering, a metalanguage, and abbreviatory devices for stating classes of sounds compactly. The description is more formally explicit than a great deal of twentieth-century work.
Practise A History of Linguistics
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More questions on A History of Linguistics
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- Approximately how many rules does Pāṇini's grammar contain, to the nearest thousand?
- Sort each statement by whether it belongs to the COMPARATIVE method or to GENERATIVE grammar.
- Which are true of Grimm's Law?
- Complete the account of the comparative method.
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