Even if the human species is not the only one that has a mind, it may be the only one that knows that it does. Fascination with our own mind, with what we feel, sense, and think, lies at the heart of human nature and has unsurprisingly become a major part of scientific inquiry itself. Rigorous scientific inquiry into the character of mind has been a part of all major traditions in scientific thought, but the character of these inquiries varied across different traditions, some of which have also been essentially separate for millennia and are only being rediscovered now. Thus, the formal study of grammar was an essential ingredient in the Indian Classical tradition, leading to more than a thousand years of rich and intense discussions in linguistics and philosophy of language in the hands of Vyakaranvadis (grammarians) such as Pāṇini, Tolkappiyar, and other authors in their traditions respectively in northern and southern India (Matilal 1990). There is essentially no parallel to this in the Ancient Greek tradition, where not grammar but geometry was the entry point to science. And although Aristotle developed a model of the sentence that has proved relatively stable for two thousand years of linguistic theory (Moro 1997), the first tradition of Universal Grammar in the Western world emerged not before the 1200s in Paris (Covington 2009), where Modistic grammarians viewed grammar as a formatting principle for a species-unique kind of thought. Flourishing across much of Northern Europe by the end of the 13 th century, it eclipsed after less than a hundred years when nominalist doctrines entered the scene and logic took pride over grammar again as a meta-theoretic framework. Interestingly, a similar eclipse happened with the grammarian tradition in India as the logico-empiricist framework of the Nyayaikas (logicians) became dominant. The next tradition in scientific thinking about human grammar, namely Port Royal, emerged within Cartesian rationalism in the 17 th century, and was taken up by Noam Chomsky in the 20 th