George Cardona (; born June 3, 1936) is an American linguist, Indologist, Sanskritist, and scholar of Pāṇini. Described as "a luminary" in Indo-European, Indo-Aryan, and Pāṇinian linguistics since the early sixties, Cardona has been recognized as the leading Western scholar of the Indian grammatical tradition (vyākaraṇa) and of the great Indian grammarian Pāṇini. He is currently Professor Emeritus of Linguistics and South Asian Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Cardona was credited by Mohammad Hamid Ansari, the vice president of India, for making the University of Pennsylvania a "center of Sanskrit learning in North America", along with Professors W. Norman Brown, Ludo Rocher, Ernest Bender, Wilhelm Halbfass, and several other Sanskritists. Early life and education George Cardona was born in New York City on June 3, 1936. Cardona obtained his BA from New York University in 1956, and his MA and PhD degrees from Yale in 1958 and 1960, respectively. His dissertation advisor at Yale was Paul Thieme, who worked primarily in Vedic studies and Sanskrit grammar. Cardona's PhD was in linguistics with a specialization in Indo-European ‒ by this time he had already begun studying Sanskrit grammar (vyākaraṇa) and related areas (especially nyāya and mīmāṃsā). Career In 1962–63, Cardona went to Gujarat state, India, where he worked on his A Gujarati reference grammar, as well as furthering his understanding of Sanskrit and Indian grammatical tradition. While in India, Cardona studied under the tutelage of native Indian gurus, including Jagannath S. Pade Shastri (his first Indian mentor and to whom his most significant work, Pāṇini: His Work and its Traditions, is dedicated), Ambika Prasad Upadhyaya, K.S. Krishnamurti Shastri, and Raghunatha Sharma. University of Pennsylvania Cardona taught Hindi and other modern Indic languages at the University of Pennsylvania. There, his earlier work in Indo-European studies at Yale slowly gave way to work primarily in Indo-Iranian and Indo-Aryan. His work on Indian grammar gained steam after his exposition of the Ṥivasūtras in 1969. After this point he directed the majority of his scholarly attention toward further vyākaraṇa scholarship and analysis of various aspects of the Aṣṭādhyāyī (lit. 'eight chapters'), which eventually culminated in his Pāṇini: His Work and Its Traditions in 1988, a current work-in-progress projected to be eight volumes. Cardona's enormous body of works and publications have evinced scholarly depth and intensity throughout his professional career. Achievements and honors He has been formally recognized for his achievements numerous times: he was