This chapter introduces Pāṇini and the ancient Indian linguistic tradition more generally, provides an introduction to the interactions between ancient Indian linguistics and modern Western linguistics and the influence of the former on the latter, and provides a brief initial foray into detailed comparison of the two, by investigating the concept of the Saussurean 'sign' in modern linguistic thought and the concept of sphoṭa in ancient Indian thought.

Dante’s unitary vision, for all its immediacy, is a vision of mediation through language and its constitutive binaries. This is demonstrated in terms of Saussurian linguistics, but the principle had been anticipated with sophistication by the semiological and language-theoretical consciousness of the Middle Ages in ways that Dante particularly develops and foregrounds. Moreover, the post-structuralist turn in which meaning is generated no longer just internally to the system of language by diacritical difference but depends on relation to an Other outside the system is also eminently embodied in Dante’s theological understanding of language. Only relation to the absolute Other of divinity can lend language its meaningfulness. Every system must relate to other systems in order to have any meaning at all, and this is structurally equivalent to referring all meaning to God.

Formal introductions to language study focus on transcribed speech, initially involving a familiar language where words and sentences seem self-evident. Presented this way, language seems to reflect an "autonomous" mental system separate from speech, which can be studied through writing signs. The arguments used to support this approach were originally formulated by Saussure and relate to nineteenth-century views of a localized language faculty in the brain. These influential arguments bolstered the concept of a speech–language division to the point that, at the turn of the twentieth century, many analysts saw instrumental observations of speech as irrelevant. In reviewing these arguments, evidence is discussed showing that the speech–language division is neither physiologically grounded nor methodologically useful in explaining the nature of features and structures of spoken language. One illustration is a study by Lindblom that shows that properties of the hearing system can shape vowel systems. Another example is given in a chapter bearing on how properties of motor speech can shape symbolic signs.