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George Cardona was born in New York City in 1936. He received a doctorate in Linguistics, specializing in comparative Indo-European, from Yale University in 1960. In India, he studied Paninian grammatical works and texts in other sastras with Jagannath S. Pade Shastri of Vadodara (Baroda), Ambika Prasad Upadhyaya, K.S. Krishnamurti Shastri of Chennai (Madras), and Raghunatha Sharma of Varanasi and Chhata. Since 1960 he has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is Professor of Linguistics. He has also taught at several other universities as a visiting professor, He was a fellow of the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioural Sciences, Palo Alto, in 1971-1972, and was Collitz Professor at the summer institute of the Linguistic Society of America at University of Illinois in 1978. He is a past president of the American Oriental Society (1989-90) and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.

Madhav M. Deshpande is Professor of Sanskrit and Linguistics in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, University of Michigan, where he has been on the faculty since 1972 teaching all levels of Sanskrit as well as Pali, Prakrit and Hinduism.  His research relates to the fields of Paninian, historical, and socio-linguistics, as well as the cultural and linguistic history of India.  Besides his research publications Aryan and Non-Aryan in India; Kaundabhatta on the Philosophy of Nominal Meaning; and Evolution of Syntactic Theory in Sanskrit Grammar, Professor Deshpande has participated in Sastric and literary debates and has also published Sanskrit poems and plays.