Indian Cambridge PhD student solves 2,500-year-old Sanskrit riddle
Rishi Rajpopat, 27, reinterpreted a grammar problem by Pāṇini, a master of the Hindu sacred language who lived in the 5th century BC. According to scholars, his intuition could revolutionise the study of a language used in India for centuries in scientific, philosophical and literary works.
London (AsiaNews/Agencies) – A grammatical problem that puzzled scholars since the 5th century BC has been solved by a Cambridge University student and could revolutionise the study of Sanskrit, the Hindu sacred language, used for centuries in India in scientific, philosophical, poetic, and literary texts.
Rishi Rajpopat, a 27-year-old Indian PhD student, managed to decode a rule taught by Pāṇini, a master of ancient Sanskrit who lived about 2,500 years ago, author of a grammar known as Astadhyayi.
Like a modern algorithm, Pāṇini's grammar turns the base and suffix of a word into grammatically correct words and sentences.
However, there was a problem that linguists had been wondering about for centuries, namely two or more of Pāṇini's rules often apply simultaneously, resulted in conflicts.
Pāṇini taught a "metarule", which is traditionally interpreted by scholars to mean, "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, applying this criterion to the letter often led to grammatically incorrect results.
Rishi Rajpopat questioned this traditional interpretation and came to the conclusion that Pāṇini actually meant something else, namely that between rules applicable to the left and right sides of a word respectively, Pāṇini wanted us to choose the rule applicable to the right side.
In applying this method, he realised that the Astadhyayi generated grammatically correct words, with practically no exception.
As for how he arrived at his conclusion, Rishi Rajpopat said: “After nine months trying to crack this problem, I was almost ready to quit, I was getting nowhere. So I closed the books for a month and just enjoyed the summer, swimming, cycling, cooking, praying and meditating. Then, begrudgingly I went back to work, and, within minutes, as I turned the pages, these patterns starting emerging, and it all started to make sense.”
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