A grammatical problem which perplexed scholars since the 5th century BC has been solved by a Cambridge University student and could “revolutionise the study of Sanskrit”, a professor said.
Key points
- Rishi Rajpopat, 27, decoded a rule taught by Panini, a master of the ancient Sanskrit language who lived around 2,500 years ago.
- Panini was a master of the ancient Sanskrit language who lived around two-and-a-half-thousand years ago.
- Panini’s grammar, known as the Astadhyayi, relied on a system that functioned like an algorithm to turn the base and suffix of a word into grammatically correct words and sentences.
- However, two or more of Panini’s rules often apply simultaneously, resulting in rule conflicts. Panini taught a “metarule”, traditionally interpreted by scholars as meaning “in the event of a conflict between two rules of equal strength, the rule that comes later in the grammar’s serial order wins”.
- However, this often led to grammatically incorrect results. Rishi Rajpopat rejected the traditional interpretation of the metarule and argued that Panini meant that between rules applicable to the left and right sides of a word respectively, Panini wanted us to choose the rule applicable to the right side.
- Employing this interpretation, he found the Panini’s “language machine” produced grammatically correct words with almost no exceptions.
- Rishi Rajpopat has presented his thesis in ‘In Panini, We Trust: Discovering the Algorithm for Rule Conflict Resolution in the Astadhyayi’.
- According to the university, leading Sanskrit experts have described Rajpopat’s discovery as “revolutionary” and it could now mean that Panini’s grammar can also be taught to computers for the first time.
- 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.
About Panini
- Panini’s system contains 4,000 rules detailed in his greatest work, the Astadhyayi, which is thought to have been written around 500 BC.
- The system is meant to work like a machine in which a base and suffix of a word can be fed to turn them into grammatically correct words and sentences through a step-by-step process.
- Ashtadhyayi is augmented with ancillary texts such as Sivasutras (special order of phonemes); dhatupatha (list of verbal roots); ganapatha (various sets of nouns) and linganusaasana (system for deciding the gender).
