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Mahesh

18/12/22 08:20 AM IST

‘Grammar’s greatest puzzle’

In News
  • In his PhD thesis, Cambridge scholar Dr Rishi Rajpopat claims to have solved Sanskrit’s biggest puzzle—a grammar problem found in the ‘Ashtadhyayi’, an ancient text written by the scholar Panini towards the end of the 4th century BC.
About Panini
  • 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.
  • 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.
What actually the problem is ?
  • 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
  • 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.
Source- Indian Express

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