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A grammatical puzzle that had gone unsolved for 2,500 years has been solved by a researcher whose solution is based on the interpretation of a single Sanskrit word.
The breakthrough has unlocked the revolutionary “language machine” — an early version of what we call an algorithm today —developed by the ancient Indian genius Pāṇini, and has opened up the possibility of adapting his influential work into software.
Rishi Rajpopat, a Sanskrit researcher made the discovery.
His PhD thesis was published recently, along with a statement announcing the news of his discovery.
“I felt relevant, historically, because suddenly I had found the meaning of something that was written 2,500 years ago, and that everyone else between me and Pāṇini had misinterpreted,” said Rajpopat, who is now an academic editor at the University of St Andrews, in Scotland.
“It felt amazing, and beyond words, honestly. I was so happy, but I was also really grateful.”
Rajpopat’s thesis lays out his solution to an intractable problem embedded in Pāṇini’s masterpiece, the Aṣṭādhyāyī which is a grammatical guide to Sanskrit, one of the most influential languages in history.
The problem that stumped scholars and researchers for centuries had to do with a meta-rule that Pāṇini included which aimed to solve the issue of what happens when two of his other rules produced different results.
According to Rajpopat, the answer lay in the interpretation of one word in that meta-rule.
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