Talk:Grammar

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 * I know that he is teaching a grammar, a set of semantic rules, and some finished algorithms, leaving the students.
 * Robert L. Ashenhurst in: ACM Turing Award Lectures: The First Twenty Years, 1966 to 1985, ACM Press, 1987, p. 139.


 * The rhetorical process functioned in many areas other than speech: Curtius wrote about 'rhetorical landscape representations' while Serpieris speaks of 'la retorica al teatro' (the rhetorical use of theatrical space), and music historians have learned that the language and approach of musical theory in the Middle Ages were borrowed directly from medieval grammar and rhetoric.
 * Thomas Binkley (1997) in: Tess Knighton, David Fallows Companion to Medieval and Renaissance Music, University of California Press, 1992, p. 41.


 * And onward to the last of our schoolmasters in the highest university, it is still intrinsically grammar, under various figures grammar. To speak in various languages, on various things, but on all of them to speak, and appropriately deliver ourselfs by tongue or pen…
 * Thomas Carlyle in: Works, Chapman et Hall, 1872, p. 146.


 * The universe was a language with a perfectly ambiguous grammar. Every physical event was an utterance that could be parsed in two entirely different ways, one causal and the other teleological.
 * Ted Chiang in: Gardner Dozois The Year's Best Science Fiction: Sixteenth Annual Collection, Macmillan, 30 July 1999, p. 331.


 * The distinction was always made, by the Greek theorists, between music, literature in the form of grammar and rhetoric, and the mathematical studies, and that higher aspect of the liberal discipline termed philosophy.
 * Frank Moore Colby, Talcott Williams in: The New international encyclopaedia, Volume 2, Dodd, Mead and company, 1930, p. 214.


 * The Pilgrim's Progress is composed in the lowest style of English, without slang or false grammar. If you were to polish it, you would at once destroy the reality of the vision.
 * Samuel Taylor Coleridge in: John Bunyan The Works of John Bunyan: Allegorical, figurative, and symbolical, Blackie and son, 1859, p. 69.


 * I don't know of any thing in my book to be criticised on by honourable men. Is it on my spelling? — that's not my trade. Is it on my grammar? — I hadn't time to learn it, and make no pretensions to it. Is it on the order and arrangement of my book? — I never wrote one before, and never read very many; and, of course, know mighty little about that. Will it be on the authorship of the book? — this I claim, and I hang on to it, like a wax plaster. The whole book is my own, and every sentiment and sentence in it. I would not be such a fool, or knave either, as to deny that I have had it hastily run over by a friend or so, and that some little alterations have been made in the spelling and grammar; and I am not so sure that it is not the worse of even that, for I despise this way of spelling contrary to nature. And as for grammar, it's pretty much a thing of nothing at last, after all the fuss that's made about it. In some places, I wouldn't suffer either the spelling, or grammar, or any thing else to be touch'd; and therefore it will be found in my own way. But if any body complains that I have had it looked over, I can only say to him, her, or them — as the case may be — that while critics were learning grammar, and learning to spell, I, and "Doctor Jackson, L.L.D." were fighting in the wars; and if our hooks, and messages, and proclamations, and cabinet writings, and so forth, and so on, should need a little looking over, and a little correcting of the spelling and the grammar to make them fit for use, its just nobody's business. Big men have more important matters to attend to than crossing their ts—, and dotting their i's—, and such like small things.
 * David Crockett in: An Autobiography of Davy Crockett, Skyhorse Publishing Inc., 2011, p. 14.


 * I don't wish to go down to posterity talking bad grammar. Correcting the Hansard proofs of his last speech to Parliament.
 * Benjamin Disraeli in: Susan Ratcliffe Oxford Dictionary of Quotations by Subject, Oxford University Press, 11 March 2010, p. 216.


 * Language is something to celebrate [Grammar Day]]
 * Grammar Day in: National Grammar Day, nationalgrammarday.com


 * I wish to write down my musical dreams in a spirit of utter self-detachment. I wish to sing of my interior visions with the naïve candour of a child. No doubt, this simple musical grammar will jar on some people. It is bound to offend the partisans of deceit and artifice. I foresee that and rejoice at it.
 * Claude Debussy in: Victor I. Seroff Debussy; musician of France, Books for Libraries Press, 1970, p. 294.


 * It is true that even across the Himalayan barrier India has sent to us such questionable gifts as grammar and logic, philosophy and fables, hypnotism and chess, and above all our numerals and our decimal system.
 * Will Durant in; Stephen Knapp The Power of the Dharma: An Introduction to Hinduism and Vedic Culture, iUniverse, 5 June 2006, p. 11.


 * The Mahābhāshya was commented on in the seventh century by Bhartṛihari in his Vākyapadīya which is concerned with the philosophy of grammar, and by Kaiyaṭa (probably thirteenth century). About 650 A.D. was composed the first complete commentary on Pāṇini, the Kāçikā Vṛitti or "Benares Commentary," by Jayāditya and Vāmana.
 * Ratnesh Dwivedi in:An Analytical Study of 'Sanskrit' and 'Panini' as Foundation of Speech Communication in India and the World, Архив электронных ресурсов СФУ (elib.sfu-kras.ru)


 * A treatise called Astadhyayi (or Astaka) is Panini's major work. It consists of eight chapters, each subdivided into quarter chapters. In this work Panini distinguishes between the language of sacred texts and the usual language of communication. Panini gives formal production rules and definitions to describe Sanskrit grammar. Starting with about 1700 basic elements like nouns, verbs, vowels, consonants he put them into classes. The construction of sentences, compound nouns etc., is explained as ordered rules operating on underlying structures in a manner similar to modern theory. In many ways Panini's constructions are similar to the way that a mathematical function is defined today., and March 4 is the perfect day to do it. It's not only a date, it's an imperative: March forth on March 4 to speak well, write well, and help others do the same!
 * Ratnesh Dwivedi in: "An Analytical Study of 'Sanskrit' and 'Panini' as Foundation of Speech Communication in India and the World".


 * I shall here present the view that numbers, even whole numbers, are words, parts of speech, and that mathematics is their grammar. Numbers were therefore invented by people in the same sense that language, both written and spoken, was invented. Grammar is also an invention. Words and numbers have no existence separate from the people who use them. Knowledge of mathematics is transmitted from one generation to another, and it changes in the same slow way that language changes. Continuity is provided by the process of oral or written transmission.
 * Carl Eckart in: Modern Idol: Mathematical Science (1984), Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, 1984, p. 95.


 * Ill-fitting grammar are like ill-fitting shoes. You can get used to it for a bit, but then one day your toes fall off and you can't walk to the bathroom.
 * Jasper Fforde in: One of our Thursdays is Missing: Thursday Next, Book 6, Hachette UK, 22 February 2011, p. 23.

G - L

 * The author of the oldest extant Sanskrit grammar was Panini, a native of extreme north-west India, ... His work consists of nearly 4000 aphorisms, each of which owing to the extreme conciseness of the style, generally consists of not more than two or three words. Hence, the whole grammar could be printed within the compass of about thirty-five octavo pages. Yet it describes the entire Sanskrit language with a completeness which has never been equalled elsewhere. Thus it is at once the shortest and the fullest grammar in the world.
 * Gazetteer in: Sanskrit literature,The Digital South Asia Library - University of Chicago (dsal.uchicago.edu)


 * Let schoolmasters puzzle their brain, With grammar, and nonsense, and learning; Good liquor, I stoutly maintain, Gives genus a better discerning, Let them brag of their heathenish gods, Their Lethes, their Styxes, and Stygians : Their quis, and their qute's, and their quod's, They're all but a parcel of pigeons.  Toroddle, toroddle, toroddle.
 * Oliver Goldsmith in: She Stoops to Conquer, etc, London, 1823, p. 13.


 * Traditionally, the mental information used to produce and process linguistic utterances is referred to as "rules." However, other frameworks employ different terminology, with theoretical implications. Optimality theory, for example, talks in terms of "constraints," while construction grammar, cognitive grammar, and other "usage-based" theories make reference to patterns, constructions, and "schemata".
 * Grammar in: Grammar (n.), etymonline.com


 * Grammar as a noun was used in early 14century. Gramar was used in surnames in 12century. It is derived from Old French gramaire "learning," especially Latin and philology, "grammar, (magic) incantation, spells, mumbo-jumbo," "irregular semi-popular adoption" [OED] of Latin grammatica, from Greek grammatike tekhne "art of letters," with a sense of both philology and literature in the broadest sense, fem. adjective from gramma "letter," from stem of graphein "to draw or write".  An Old English word for it was stæfcræft.
 * Grammar in: "Grammar (n.)"


 * Form grammar is from late 14th century. Restriction to "rules of language" is a post-classical development, but as this type of study was until 16th century, limited to Latin, Middle English gramarye also came to mean "learning in general, knowledge peculiar to the learned classes" (early 14th century.), which included astrology and magic; hence the secondary meaning of "occult knowledge" (late 15century.), which evolved in Scottish into glamor.
 * Grammar in: "Grammar (n.)"


 * A grammar school (late 14th century) originally was "a school in which the learned languages are grammatically taught" [Johnson, who also has grammaticaster "a mean verbal pedant"]. In U.S. (1842) the term was put to use in the graded system for a school between primary and secondary where English grammar is taught.
 * Grammar in: "Grammar (n.)"


 * Traditionally, grammar has always been a grammar of written language: and it has always been a product grammar" ['Product' is here used as one term of the Hjelmslevian pair process/product.]. A process/product distinction is a relevant one for linguists because it corresponds to that between our experience of speech and our experience of writing: writing exists whereas speech happens.
 * M. A. K. Halliday in: Ross Steele Language topics, John Benjamins, 1987, p. 146.


 * Nothing could go wrong because nothing had...I meant "nothing would." No - Then I quit trying to phrase it, realizing that if time travel ever became widespread, English grammar was going to have to add a whole new set of tenses to describe reflexive situations - conjugations that would make the French literary tenses and the Latin historical tenses look simple.”
 * Robert A. Heinlein in: Physics letters, North-Holland, 2001, p. 241.


 * The most interesting non-Western grammatical tradition—and the most original and independent—is that of India, which dates back at least two and one-half millennia and which culminates with the grammar of Panini, of the 5th century BCE. There are three major ways in which the Sanskrit tradition has had an impact on modern linguistic scholarship.
 * Pavle Ivić in: Linguistics, britannica.com, 9 April 2013.


 * One great part of every human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wide awake language, cut and dry grammar and go ahead plot.
 * James Joyce in: Jacques Aubert, Maria Jolas Joyce & Paris: 1902.....1920-1940.....1975, Volume 2, Presses Univ. Septentrion, 1979, p. 139.


 * What really alarms me about President Bush's 'War on Terrorism' is the grammar. How do you wage war on an abstract noun? How is 'Terrorism' going to surrender? It's well known, in philological circles, that it's very hard for abstract nouns to surrender.
 * Terry Jones in: Anna Kiernan Voices for peace: an anthology, Scribner, 26 March 2002, p. 99.


 * Thus the founders of grammar were Sibawaih and after him, al-Farisi and Az-Zajjaj. All of them were of Persian descent...they invented rules of (Arabic) grammar...great jurists were Persians… only the Persians engaged in the task of preserving knowledge and writing systematic scholarly works. Thus the truth of the statement of the prophet becomes apparent, "If learning were suspended in the highest parts of heaven the Persians would attain it"....The intellectual sciences were also the preserve of the Persians, left alone by the Arabs, who did not cultivate them...as was the case with all crafts...This situation continued in the cities as long as the Persians and Persian countries, Iraq, Khorasan and Transoxiana (modern Central Asia), retained their sedentary culture.
 * Ibn Khaldun in: Mehraban Khodavandi An Analysis of Teacher Training Programs in Iran, University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1980, p. 25.


 * The grammatical treatises on Kannada were constructed on the Samskrita plan. Their Jaina authors took Panini and others as their guides. The earliest grammarian, whose works have come down to us, is N'agavarma who appears to belong to the first half of the 12th century.
 * Ferdinand Kittel in: A Grammar of the Kannada Language: Comprising the Three Dialects of the Language (ancient, Medieval and Modern), Asian Educational Services, 01 January 1993, p. 3.


 * The ancient Kannada grammarians held the study of grammar in high esteem, as may be learned from the following words of the author of the Sabdaamnidarpana: " Through grammar (correct) words originate, through the words of that grammar meaning the beholding of truth the desired final beatitude.
 * Ferdinand Kittel in: "A Grammar of the Kannada Language: Comprising the Three Dialects of the Language (ancient, Medieval and Modern)", p. 3.


 * Nouns, a broad classification in Tamil grammatical terminology, include common and proper nouns, numerals, pronouns and some so-called adjectives; they inflect for case, person, number (singular and plural), and gender. There are two genders which are based on the referent's natural gender and correspond roughly to the distinction human/nonhuman; they are called "rational" (e.g., nouns referring to men, deities, women in some dialects) and "irrational" (e.g., women in some dialects, children, animals) respectively. There are 8 cases (nominative, accusative, dative, sociative, genitive, instrumental, locative, and ablative).
 * Centre for World Languages in: Tamil, UCLA International Institute, Centre for World Languages


 * Verbs are formally inflected principally for mood and tense by a grammatical particle suffixed to the stem. Most verbs also mark affective and effective "voice" (not equivalent to the notions "transitivity" or "causation") where the former indicates that the subject undergoes the action named by the stem, and the latter signals that the subject directs the action of the stem. Mood is also marked implicitly by grammatical formatives which also mark tense categories. These signal that the verbal event is, for example, unreal, possible, potential, or a real, and actual. There are three simple tenses (past, present, and future), and a series of perfects.
 * Centre for World Languages in: "Tamil"


 * No one would seriously doubt that grammar constitutes a central level of linguistic structuring, and most people would agree that standard English, while being one variety among many from a purely descriptive—linguistic point of view, has been the most studied and best documented one because of its social and cultural prominence.
 * Geoffrey Leech et al., in: Change in Contemporary English: A Grammatical Study, Cambridge University Press, 22 October 2009, p. 1.


 * Grammar is more than an arbitrary list of shibboleths.
 * Geoffrey Leech et al., in: "Change in Contemporary English: A Grammatical Study", p. 1.


 * The grammar, seen as the system of rules and options underlying usage, has been very stable for the past few centuries. What might have changed, though, are stylistic conventions or expectations of formality.
 * Geoffrey Leech et al., in: "Change in Contemporary English: A Grammatical Study", p. 4.


 * Grammar is probably the level on which the English language has changed most radically in the course of its recorded history, and this is noted in treatments of Old and Middle English.
 * Geoffrey Leech et al., in: "Change in Contemporary English: A Grammatical Study", p. 7.


 * Although there has been considerable grammatical change in the past, English grammar in our life time is somehow uniquely stable and free from change.
 * Geoffrey Leech et al., in: "Change in Contemporary English: A Grammatical Study", p. 7.


 * In the history of English, verbal constructions (use of the progressive constructions and and also semi-modals) have been recognized as classic cases of the grammaticalization process... Grammaticalization has in the past provided a neat explanation of how main—verb constructions have progressively evolved towards auxiliary verb constructions.
 * Geoffrey Leech et al., in: "Change in Contemporary English: A Grammatical Study", p. 49.


 * Besides loans from Sanskrit, and some borrowing from Persian and Arabic, English in modern times has supplied a lot of loan words, but because of the emphasis on linguistic purism in Tamil grammatical tradition loans are assimilated to the phonological system.
 * Centre for World Languages in: "Tamil"


 * You are a native speaker of English; in ten minutes you can produce more illustrations of any point in English grammar than you will find in many millions of words of random text.
 * Robert Lees (linguist) in: Geoffrey Leech Change in Contemporary English: A Grammatical Study, Cambridge University Press, 22 October 2009, p. 25.

M - R

 * Next we have the Vārttikas or "Notes" of Kātyāyana (probably third century B.C.) on 1245 of Pāṇini's rules, and, somewhat later, numerous grammatical Kārikās or comments in metrical form: all this critical work was collected by Patanjali in his Mahābhāshya or "Great Commentary," with supplementary comments of his own. He deals with 1713 rules of Pāṇini.
 * Arthur Anthony Macdonell in:Appendix A History of Sanskrit Literature, Wikisource.


 * We cannot describe how the mind is made without having good ways to describe complicated processes. Before computers, no languages were good for that. Piaget tried algebra and Freud tried diagrams; other psychologists used Markov Chains and matrices, but none came to much. Behaviorists, quite properly, had ceased to speak at all. Linguists flocked to formal syntax, and made progress for a time but reached a limit: transformational grammar shows the contents of the registers (so to speak), but has no way to describe what controls them. This makes it hard to say how surface speech relates to underlying designation and intent–a baby-and-bath-water situation. I prefer ideas from AI research because there we tend to seek procedural description first, which seems more appropriate for mental matters.
 * Marvin Minsky in: Mind, and Meaning" (1981), MIT Media Lab - Official Site


 * English has a grammar of great simplicity and flexibility.
 * Robert MacNeil et al., in: The story of English, Penguin Books, 1992, p. 30.
 * La grammaire qui sait régenter jusqu'aux rois.
 * Grammar, which knows how to control even kings.
 * Molière in Les Femmes Sevantes (1672) in Act II, sc. vi., in:Corneille et son temps: étude littéraire, Didier, 1858, p. 96 and in: Les Femmes Sevantes (1672) in Act II, sc. vi. Quoted in: James Gosling The Java Language Specification, Addison-Wesley Professional, 2000, p. 90.


 * I have declared again and again that if I say Aryans, I mean neither blood nor bones, nor hair nor skull; I mean simply those who speak an Aryan language Aryan language... in that sense, and in that sense only, do I say that even the blackest Hindus represent an earlier stage of Aryan speech and thought than the fairest Scandinavians... To me an ethnologist who speaks of Aryan race, Aryan blood, Aryan eyes and hair, is as great a sinner as a linguist who speaks of a dolichocephalic dictionary or a brachycephalic grammar.
 * Max Müller in: S. N. Sadasivan in:A Social History of India, APH Publishing, 1 January 2000, p. 3.


 * Brazilian Portuguese (português brasileiro) is a romance language from the indo-european family. Originating from Portugal, it has evolved separately from European Portuguese since the 16th century, both in spelling and pronunciation. It is regulated by the Brazilian Academy of Letters (Academia Brasileira de Letras).
 * Portuguese in: Language overview, Of Languages and Numbers.


 * No more than in red lips unsmiling Can I find anything beguiling in grammar-perfect Russian speech. What purist magazines beseech, A novel breed of belles may heed it And bend us (for my life of sin) To strict grammatic discipline, Prescribing meter, too, where needed; But I— what is all this to me? I like things as they used to be
 * Aleksandr Pushkin in: Robert H. Stacy Russian Literary Criticism: A Short History, Syracuse University Press, 1974 –


 * The question of "unreality," which confronts us at this point, is a very important one. Misled by grammar, the great majority of those logicians who have dealt with this question have dealt with it on mistaken lines.
 * Bertrand Russel in: Susana Nuccetelli, Gary Seay Philosophy of Language: The Central Topics, Rowman & Littlefield, 2008, p. 148.

S - Z

 * Maybe it would serve you well to expect nothing more from philosophy than a voice, language, and grammar of the instinct for godliness that lies at its origin and, essentially, is philosophy itself.
 * Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel in: Jochen Schulte-Sasse, Haynes Horne Theory as Practice: A Critical Anthology of Early German Romantic Writings, U of Minnesota Press, 1997, p. 421.


 * ...sagacity enough to read other people's countenances; and serenity enough not to let them discover anything by yours — a seeming frankness, with a real reserve. These are the rudiments of a politician; the world must be your grammar.
 * Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield in: Letters on education, Bentley, 1847, p. 103.


 * A Grammarian is so. Afraid. Is a word. To look back in the direction in which they came To look back in the way they had come. Now you that means that others had come and others look back in the direction that others had come.
 * Gertrude Stein in: Gertrude Stein: The Language That Rises: 1923-1934, Northwestern University Press, 19 December 2008, p. 402.


 * Grammar little by little is not a thing. Which may gain. Perhaps means that the old grammar is gone or grammar is not one thing but many, a flexible capacity to join words.
 * Gertrude Stein in: "Gertrude Stein: The Language That Rises: 1923-1934", p. 402.


 * I can do it so easily it always makes grammar but is it grammar. She praises her struggle for invention. She plays with numbers, which her grammar liberates from numbers' rules as it liberates words from the rules of traditional grammar. The essence of grammar is it is freed of following.
 * Gertrude Stein in: "Gertrude Stein: The Language That Rises: 1923-1934", p. 403.


 * In learning a language, when from mere words we reach the laws of words, we have gained a great deal. But if we stop at that point and concern ourselves only with the marvels of the formation of a language, seeking the hidden reason of all its apparent caprices, we do not reach that end, for grammar is not literature...When we come to literature, we find that, though it conforms to the rules of grammar, it is yet a thing of joy; it is freedom itself. The beauty of a poem is bound by strict laws, yet it transcends them. The laws are its wings. They do not keep it weighed down. They carry it to freedom. Its form is in law, but its spirit is in beauty. Law is the first step toward freedom, and beauty is the complete liberation which stands on the pedestal of law. Beauty harmonizes in itself the limit and the beyond – the law and the liberty.
 * Rabindranath Tagore in: Sadhana the Realization of Life, Filiquarian Publishing, LLC., 1 January 2006, p. 77.


 * Thousands count out loud The way thousands count loud they do it without moving their lips Made a mountain out of Now this is perfectly a description of an emplacement. If you think of grammar as a part. Can one reduce grammar to one. One two three all out but she. Now I am playing.
 * Gertrude Stein in: "Gertrude Stein: The Language That Rises: 1923-1934", p. 403.
 * In general, grammar includes phonology, morphology and syntax. But Classical Tamil tradition seems to differ from this. The earliest grammar Tholkappiyam deals not only with phonology, morphology and syntax but also with personal and impersonal, internal and external dialects of life, beauty of literature, behavioral dialects of human life, Tamil linguistic traditions, etc., and this portion is termed Porulathikaram.
 * Tamil in: Tamil Language, History and Literature, South Asia Studies At Penn! - University Of Pennsylvania.


 * Her Portrait Oh, but the heavenly grammar did I hold Of that high speech which angels' tongues turn gold! So should her deathless beauty take no wrong,  Praised in her own kindreds’ fit and cognac tongue, Or if that language yet with us abode Which Adam in the garden talked with God!
 * Francis Thompson in: Poems of Francis Thompson, A&C Black, 4 July 2002, p. 15.


 * To be serious, I write good grammar myself, but not in that spirit, I am thankful to say. That is to say, my grammar is of a high order, though not at the top. Nobody's is. Perfect grammar—persistent, continuous, sustained—is the fourth dimension, so to speak many have sought it, but none has found it.
 * Mark Twain in Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1: The Complete and Authoritative Edition, University of California Press, 15-Nov-2010, p. 120.


 * I am of the firm belief that everybody could write books and I never understand why they don't. After all, everyone speaks. Once the grammar has been learnt it is simply talking on paper and in time learning what not to say.
 * James Vinson, D. L. Kirkpatrick (eds.) in: Contemporary Novelists, St. James Press, 1976, p. 56.


 * No one complains of the rules of Grammar as fettering Language; because it is understood that correct use is not founded on Grammar, but Grammar on correct use. A just system of Logic or of Rhetoric is analogous, in this respect, to Grammar.
 * Richard Whately in: Elements of Rhetoric (1828), p. 17 and in: Encyclopædia metropolitana; or, System of universal knowledge, Encyclopaedia, 1849


 * The very natural tendency to use terms derived from traditional grammar like verb, noun, adjective, passive voice, in describing languages outside of Indo-European is fraught with grave possibilities of misunderstanding.
 * Benjamin Lee Whorf (1937) "Grammer categories" in: Language, (1945) Vol 21. p. 1-11.


 * "Elohim," the name for the creative power in Genesis, is a female plural, a fact that generations of learned rabbis and Christian theologians have all explained as merely grammatical convention. The King James and most other Bibles translate it as "God," but if you take the grammar literally, it seems to mean "goddesses." Al Shaddai, god of battles, appears later, and YHWH, mispronounced Jehovah, later still.
 * Robert Anton Wilson, Everything Is Under Control (1998) "Genesis", p. 197.

Out of scope
See What_Wikiquote_is_not


 * Ashtadhyayi Sanskrit treatise on grammar was written in the 6th to 5th century BCE by the Indian grammarian Panini. This work set the linguistic standards for Classical Sanskrit. It sums up in 4,000 sutras the science of phonetics and grammar that had evolved in the Vedic religion. Panini divided his work into eight chapters, each of which is further divided into quarter chapters, beyond defining the morphology and syntax of Sanskrit language.
 * Encyclopedia Britannica in: Panini Indian grammarian, britannica.com.


 * By the grammar of a language is meant either the relations borne by the words of a sentence and by sentences themselves one to another, or the systematized exposition of these. The exposition may be, and frequently is, incorrect; but it always presupposes the existence of certain customary uses of words when in combination. In what follows, therefore, grammar will be generally employed in its primary sense, as denoting the mode in which words are connected in order to express a complete thought, or, as it is termed in logic, a proposition.
 * Encyclopedia Britannica in: 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Grammar, WikiSource


 * What grammar really deals with are all those contrivances whereby the relations of words and sentences are pointed out. Sometimes it is position, sometimes phonetic symbolization, sometimes composition, sometimes flexion, sometimes the use of auxiliaries, which enables the speaker to combine his words in such a way that they shall be intelligible to another. Grammar may accordingly be divided into the three departments of composition or “word-building,”syntax and accidence, by which is meant an exposition of the means adopted by language for expressing the relations of grammar when recourse is not had to composition or simple position.
 * Encyclopedia Britannica in:"1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Grammar"


 * A good practical grammar of a language, therefore, should be based on a correct appreciation of the facts which it expounds, and a correct appreciation of the facts is only possible where they are examined and co-ordinated in accordance with the scientific method. A practical grammar ought, wherever it is possible, to be preceded by a scientific grammar.
 * Encyclopedia Britannica in:"1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Grammar"


 * Grammar constitutes the surest and most important basis for a classification of languages. Words may be borrowed freely by one dialect from another, or, though originally unrelated, may, by the action of phonetic decay, come to assume the same forms, while the limited number of articulate sounds and conceptions out of which language was first developed, and the similarity of the circumstances by which the first speakers were everywhere surrounded, naturally produce a resemblance between the roots of many unconnected tongues. Where, however, the fundamental conceptions of grammar and the machinery by which they are expressed are the same, we may have no hesitation in inferring a common origin.
 * Encyclopedia Britannica in:"1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Grammar"


 * School grammars are the inheritance we have received from Greece and Rome. The necessities of rhetoric obliged the History of formal grammar. Sophists to investigate the structure of the Greek language, and to them was accordingly due the first analysis of Greek grammar.
 * Encyclopedia Britannica in:"1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Grammar"


 * The grammar of a language is not to be confined within the rules laid down by grammarians, much less is it the creation of grammarians, and consequently the usual mode of making the pupil learn by heart certain fixed rules and paradigms not only gives a false idea of what grammar really is, but also throws obstacles in the way of acquiring it. The unit of speech is the sentence; and it is with the sentence therefore, and not with lists of words and forms, that the pupil should begin. When once a sufficient number of sentences has been, so to speak, assimilated, it will be easy to analyse them into their component parts, to show the relations that these bear to one another, and to indicate the nature and varieties of the latter. In this way the learner will be prevented from regarding grammar as a piece of dead mechanism or a Chinese puzzle, of which the parts must be fitted together in accordance with certain artificial rules, and will realize that it is a living organism which has a history and a reason of its own. The method of nature and science alike is analytic; and if we would learn a foreign language properly we must learn it as we did our mother-tongue, by first mastering the expression of a complete thought and then breaking up this expression into its several elements.
 * Encyclopedia Britannica in:"1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Grammar"

Unsuitable for theme article because topic is highly specialized and only incidentally related to theme

 * Though its fame is much restricted by its specialized nature, there is no doubt that Panini's grammar is one of the greatest intellectual achievements of any ancient civilization, and the most detailed and scientific grammar composed before the 19th century in any part of the world.
 * Professor A. L. Basham in: Daya Kishan Thussu Communicating India's Soft Power: Buddha to Bollywood, Palgrave Macmillan, 24 October 2013, p. 47.


 * Grammars (vyākaraṇas) concern the description of speech forms (śabda) considered to be correct (sādhu) through derivation and thereby serve to make understood the usage found in the Vedas. The grammar that was granted the status of a Vedāṅga is that of Pāṇini. This work is referred to in toto as a śabdānuśāsana (means of instruction of correct speech forms); since the core of Pāṇini’s work comprises the eight chapters of sūtras that serve to describe both the current language of his time and features particular to Vedic, it also bears the name Aṣṭādhyāyī (“Collection of Eight Chapters”).
 * Prof. George Cardona in: Indo-Aryan languages, britannica.com., 20 January 2014.

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 * The greater part of the world's troubles are due to questions of grammar.
 * Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays