London: Rishi Rajpopat, a PhD student at Cambridge University, has solved a 2500-year-old grammar problem from Ashtadhyayi — a Sanskrit text written by philologist, grammarian and revered scholar Panini around 6th or 5th century BCE, The Indian Express reported.
Ashtadhyayi, comprising 4000 sutras, explains the science behind Sanskrit, but has often been compared to the abstract Turing machine because of its complex set of rules for creating words. Two or more of Panini’s rules, however, can apply at the same time, which has been a source of confusion for centuries.
Panini wrote a ‘meta rule’ to resolve these conflicts, which had 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’.
Rajpopat, in his PhD thesis titled ‘In Panini We Trust’, has rejected this system and gone with a simpler interpretation of Panini’s sutras.
Rajpopat says the ‘meta rule’ has always been misunderstood because what Panini actually meant was that for rules applicable to the left and right sides of a word, readers should use the right-hand side operation.
Rajpopat used this logic and found that Ashtadhyayi could create an accurate language algorithm, producing grammatically sound words and sentences almost every time.
“Several months after I started working on my thesis, I discovered that Kātyāyana had also deduced the same logic in a remote corner of his work. However, he too seemed to have decided to use alternate interpretations… Since in the Sanskrit tradition, scholars build up on the previous expert’s work more than the canonical text, this interpretation of the rule seems to have fallen through the cracks,” ThePrint quoted Rajpopat as saying.
Rajpopat’s theory has been hailed as ‘revolutionary’ by experts in his field as it justifies Ashtadhyayi’s logic for writing Sanskrit as machine-like in nature.
