Indian PhD student at Cambridge solves 2,500-year-old Sanskrit grammatical problem
Mangalore Today News Network
New Delhi, Dec 16, 2022: An Indian PhD student at the University of Cambridge solved a 2500-year-old Sanskrit grammatical problem that had defeated Sanskrit scholars since the 5th Century BC. He solved the Sanskrit language problem when he published his thesis on Thursday.
Rishi Rajpopat has a ‘Eureka’ moment when he made a breakthrough by decoding a rule taught by Panini in his thesis titled ‘In Panini, We Trust: Discovering the Algorithm for Rule Conflict Resolution in the Astadhyayi’. Panini is known as the father of linguistics.
The breakthrough is seen as “revolutionary” by leading Sanskrit experts. The discovery could mean that Panini’s grammar can also be taught to computers for the first time.
After the discovery, Rishi Rajpopat said “I had an eureka moment in Cambridge.”
The 27-year-old Cambridge scholar said, “After nine months trying to crack this problem, I was almost ready to quit, I was getting nowhere. So, I closed the books for a month and just enjoyed the summer, swimming, cycling, cooking, praying and meditating. Then, begrudgingly I went back to work, and, within minutes, as I turned the pages, these patterns started emerging, and it all started to make sense. There was a lot more work to do but I’d found the biggest part of the puzzle.”
After he figured that out, he would spend hours in the library to solve related problems.
Talking about Panini, Rajpopat said, “Panini had an extraordinary mind and he built a machine unrivalled in human history. He didn’t expect us to add new ideas to his rules. The more we fiddle with Panini’s grammar, the more it eludes us.”
The discovery would make it possible, for the first time, to accurately use Panini’s so-called “language machine”.
With the help of the 27-year-old’s discovery, it would now be possible to “derive” any Sanskrit word, to construct millions of grammatically correct words, using Panini’s revered language machine, which is widely considered to be one of the greatest intellectual achievements in history.
Panini’s system – 4,000 rules detailed in his renowned work, the Astadhyayi, which is thought to have been written around 500 BC – is meant to work like a machine. Feed in the base and suffix of a word and it should turn them into grammatically correct words and sentences through a step-by-step process.
Until now, however, there has been a big problem. Often, two or more of Panini’s rules are simultaneously applicable at the same step leaving scholars to agonise over which one to choose. Solving so-called “rule conflicts”, which affect millions of Sanskrit words including certain forms of “mantra” and “guru”, requires an algorithm. Rajpopat’s research shows that Panini’s so-called language machine is also self-sufficient.
After the discovery, Sanskrit professor and Rajpopat’s PhD supervisor Professor Vincenzo Vergiani said, “My student Rishi has cracked it – he has found an extraordinarily elegant solution to a problem which has perplexed scholars for centuries. This discovery will revolutionise the study of Sanskrit at a time when interest in the language is on the rise.”
Sanskrit is an ancient and classical Indo-European language from South Asia. While only spoken in India by an estimated 25,000 people today, it has influenced many other languages and cultures around the world.
Courtesy: India Today