A grammatical problem which has defeated #Sanskrit scholars since the 5thC BC finally solved by an Indian #PhD student at the University of #Cambridge.
Rishi Rajpopat (St John's College) made the breakthrough by decoding a rule taught by “the father of #linguistics” #Pāṇini.
The discovery makes it possible to 'derive' any Sanskrit word – to construct millions of grammatically correct words including ‘mantra’ and ‘guru’ – using Pāṇini’s revered ‘#language machine’ https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/solving-grammars-greatest-puzzle
Ancient grammatical puzzle solved after 2,500 years
How a determined student made Sanskrit’s ‘language machine’ work for the first time in 2,500 years
"Leading Sanskrit experts have described Rajpopat’s discovery as ‘revolutionary’ and it could now mean that Pāṇini’s grammar can be taught to computers for the first time.
Pāṇini’s system – 4,000 rules detailed in his renowned work, the Aṣṭādhyāyī, which is thought to have been written around 500BC – 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."
Following a Masters at
#Oxford, for which he raised money by writing to hundreds of potential donors,
#Rajpopat started his
#PhD at St John’s College and
#Cambridge’s Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies in 2017 on a full
#scholarship funded by the Cambridge Trust and the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation. He was awarded his
#doctorate in January 2022. He recently joined the School of
#Divinity at the University of
#StAndrews.
#Sanskrit #India #Hindu
Dr Ian McCormick
Debra