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- An Indian student claims to have solved Sanskrit’s biggest puzzle—a grammar problem found in the ‘Ashtadhyayi’.
About
- Confusion in Interpretation of Ashtadhyayi:
- Ashtadhyayi delves deep into the language’s phonetics, syntax and grammar.
- It also offers a ‘language machine’, where you can feed in the root and suffix of any Sanskrit word, and get grammatically correct words and sentences in return.
- To ensure this ‘machine’ was accurate, Panini wrote a set of 4,000 rules dictating its logic.
- But as scholars studied it, they found that two or more of the rules could apply at the same time, causing confusion. To resolve this, Panini had provided a ‘meta-rule’ (a rule governing rules), which had historically been interpreted as:
- ‘In the event of a conflict between two rules of equal strength, the rule that comes later in the serial order of the ‘Ashtadhyayi’ wins’.
- However, following this interpretation did not solve the machine’s problem.
- It kept producing exceptions, for which scholars had to keep writing additional rules.
- Solution to This Problem:
- In his thesis titled ‘In Panini We Trust’, Dr Rishi Rajpopat took a simpler approach, arguing that the meta-rule has been wrongly interpreted throughout history; what Panini actually meant, was that for rules applying to the left and right sides of a word, readers should use the right-hand side rule.
- Using this logic, he found that the ‘Ashtadhyayi’ could finally become an accurate ‘language machine’, producing grammatically sound words and sentences almost every time.
- The discovery now makes it possible to construct millions of Sanskrit words using Panini’s system—and since his grammar rules were exact and formulaic, they can act as a Sanskrit language algorithm that can be taught to computers.
Panini, the ‘father of linguistics’
- Period:
- Panini probably lived in the 4th century BC, the age of the conquests of Alexander and the founding of the Mauryan Empire.
- He has also been dated to the 6th century BC, the age of The Buddha and Mahavira.
- Location:
- He likely lived in Salatura (Gandhara), which today would lie in north-west Pakistan.
- Panini was probably associated with the great university at Taksasila, which also produced Kautilya and Charaka, the ancient Indian masters of statecraft and medicine respectively.
About Ashtadhyayi
- ‘Ashtadhyayi’, or ‘Eight Chapters’ – Panini’s great grammar
- It is a linguistics text that set the standard for how Sanskrit was meant to be written and spoken.
- The Ashtadhyayi laid down more than 4,000 grammatical rules, couched in a sort of shorthand, which employs single letters or syllables for the names of the cases, moods, persons, tenses, etc. in which linguistic phenomena are classified.
- Significance:
- By the time it was composed, Sanskrit had virtually reached its classical form — and developed little thereafter, except in its vocabulary.
- Panini’s grammar, which built on the work of many earlier grammarians, effectively stabilized the Sanskrit language.
- Panini’s grammar is one of the greatest intellectual achievements of any ancient civilization, and the most detailed and scientific grammar composed before the 19th century in any part of the world.
- The earlier works had recognised the root as the basic element of a word, and had classified some 2,000 monosyllabic roots which, with the addition of prefixes, suffixes and inflexions, were thought to provide all the words of the language.
- Commentaries on Panini:
- Later Indian grammars such as the Mahabhasya of Patanjali (2nd century BC) and
- the Kashika Vritti of Jayaditya and Vamana (7th century AD)
Source: IE
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