Bloomfield, Leonard. 1929. Review of Konkordanz Pāṇini-Candra, by Bruno Liebich. Language 5 (4): 267–76.

In the guise of a review of Liebich's Konkordanz Pāṇini-Candra (1928), about which he writes only one paragraph directly, Bloomfield goes to some length to justify the importance of Pāṇini in the history of language analysis.

Bloomfield first sets out ways the philological approach to the study of the Indian grammarians was founded on misconceptions and prejudice.

Pāṇini was describing a colloquial speech, a conservative upper-class language, to be sure, but a language native to him and used in everyday life by the Brahmins. (p. 269)

[B]ecause the Indians had not discovered the history of language, their work was supposed to be negligible. One forgot that the comparative grammar of the Indo-European languages got its start only when the Pāṇinean analysis of an Indo-European language became known in Europe. (p. 270)

Bloomfield then summarises how Pāṇini's compression of his "complete description of a language" was achieved and the difficulties that has brought for intelligibility, together with an overview of the subsequent history of Indian scholarly work engaging with Pāṇini.