Dear Colleagues,

A friend and colleague, Prof Nick Evans, is a leading authority on Indigenous Australian languages.  He has asked this question about syllables in Pāṇini. Can anyone advise him?

"I'm wondering if ... you know whether Pāṇini figured out a way of incorporating rule-sensitive to number of syllables in his rule statements. Do you know how he did it, if he did?
The reason I'm asking is that, as part of a special readings course for our doctoral students, we are spending a couple of weeks on aspects of that tradition, and for fun I've asked them to write some morphophonemic rules, in the style of the Aṣṭādhyāyī, for an Australian language, Lardil.  And to do that they will need to refer to the number of syllables (monosyllabic, disyllabic, or more than two). Being ignorant of Sanskrit I don't know whether syllable-sensitivity is ever relevant"