grammarian panini

I was reading about Panini - the 'inventor' of the detailed rules of grammar. Over 2500 years ago he outlined the structure of language, with 4000 rules about roots, prefixes, suffixes, parts of speech etc.

With out his efforts, our studies on cognitive psychology would be non-existent. We can recognize patterns in the dialogue of children - and identify a child's progress in developing these patterns. For example when kids use the incorrect form of a word in the past tense, like 'goed' or 'taked', it is easy to see the error but it shows that the child has understood the general rule of adding 'ed' at the end of a word to emphasize the verb already happened.

Studies in developmental progress like this one would not be so advanced with out attributes to Panini.