PhD student solves 2,500-year-old Sanskrit problem
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
> Mr Rajpopat said he had "a eureka moment in Cambridge" after spending nine months "getting nowhere".
> "I closed the books for a month and just enjoyed the summer - swimming, cycling, cooking, praying and meditating," he said.
> "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."
Sometimes the best thing to do after grinding is to just walk away for awhile.
It works.
Many more mathematical scientists I know do exactly the same thing on occasion Mostly, in order to make progress you need to work at it a lot. Sometimes, however, you need to go away and let it churn away in the back of your mind before trying again and revisiting it with fresh eyes and new knowledge but with your old familiarity. One of the most useful pieces of advice I have ever received was 'try to procrastinate from work with work'. There's something about knowing that the solution to the problem exists (but you don't have it) that really motivates detailed study but will slowly drive you mad if you're not careful.
This is a somewhat misleading explanation of what Sanskrit is. The Sanskrit language is the ancestor of many northern Indian languages, similarly to how Latin is the ancestor of the Romance languages; Pāṇini wrote his famous grammatical description of Classical Sanskrit around 500 BC, give or take a hundred years or so. Sanskrit is of great significance both historically and religiously, and has been studied continuously since that time. There has also been a recent language revival effort, which is presumably what the reference to ‘25000 speakers’ is talking about.
There are 2,360,821 total speakers of Sanskrit in India, as of 2011. However, despite attempts at revival there are no first language speakers of Sanskrit in India. In each of India's recent decennial censuses, several thousand citizens have reported Sanskrit to be their mother tongue, but the numbers are thought to signify a wish to be aligned with the prestige of the language.
Also most schools have Sanskrit as an optional subject (its not very popular in the modern schools, but kids learn at least for 5 years)
Its impossible to navigate Indian life without hearing Sanskrit - whether it is in rituals, marriage ceremonies, TV shows, ads and often even school prayers.
> Sanskrit, although not widely spoken, is the sacred language of Hinduism and has been used in India's science, philosophy, poetry and other secular literature over the centuries.
For more on the domain—the tradition of grammar/vyākaraṇa and the dizzying heights reached by Pāṇini—I recommend this really good essay "Pāṇini: Catching the Ocean in a Cow’s Hoofprint" [1] by the novelist Vikram Chandra (known now as the author of Sacred Games thanks to the Netflix show, but possibly better known among HN readers as the author of Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty). Or if you're looking to get a glimpse by diving into some technical papers (but readable in English), search for "Panini" on Prof. Kiparsky's page: https://web.stanford.edu/~kiparsky/
Within this still-much-studied tradition—of <4000 terse rules, less than 50 pages when printed, that nail down Sanskrit grammar to a level of detail that has never been matched for any other natural language, and likely will never be—the news here is about a new interpretation of one of the "metarules", which (IIUC) experts used to use contextually, but did not always "work" when blindly applied literally. I imagine that it will take time and discussion by many grammarians before it's clear whether this new interpretation is really a better one.
Direct link to the PhD thesis that the article is about: https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.80099
[1]: https://blog.granthika.co/panini/ PDF: https://downloads.granthika.co/miscellaneous/Catching+the+Oc...
Sanskrit is, after all, a language which has a vast body of literature stretching for ~6000 years. It is tricky to have a perfect set of rules.
Historically Sanskrit scholars had found it difficult to accept this idea of diverging usage of the language and labelled a vast majority of contemporary literature as Apabhraṃśa (literally meaning aberration). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apabhra%E1%B9%83%C5%9Ba
This weird fixation with rules is what has caused the language to decline over the last several centuries. As you might expect, the famous ancient Sanskrit bodies of work do not really adhere to the strict rules laid out later. That is not surprising, as the rules-people were usually distinct from the poets and story tellers.
Even now you will find the nationalists and the leftists in India exagerrate the negatives and positives in popular media (of Sanskrit and ancient Indian culture)
Think of the Sanskrit bodies of literature. How many important ones were written after 500BC, vs before?
Most of Indian literature after that period was in various forms of Prakrit, Magadhi, Pali, proto-Tamil.
Creation of new literature strongly corresponds with how much a language is being used.
> modern programmers would immediately compare the workings of Pāṇini’s rules to those of string functions in modern programming languages
(this is not about Sanskrit as a language, but specifically about Pāṇini's rules which is analogous to a term-rewriting system / string functions / macros)
and
> to claim that Sanskrit would be a perfect language for computer programming.[46] This claim demonstrates an essential misunderstanding of what programming languages
which goes against what you're saying.
You should rework your beliefs based on facts rather than be biased by poorly written articles.
Why is the interest rising though?
I suspect the more likely answer is that we are about slightly more than a generation away from India’s fiscal opening in the 1990s which led to a tremendous rise in wealth, and it’s usually children of wealthier people who can afford to pay the opportunity costs of basing a career in the humanities as opposed to STEM or Finance related, so now there are more Indians who would take up the humanities.
And if you are taking up the humanities, it makes sense to research highly under-researched and yet extremely old areas of the culture your family is from, since it’s a wide open area with a lot of opportunities that you may have an edge in, having been raised in or adjacent to the culture.
In the languages space this would mean more research in Sanskrit and potentially other indigenous languages.
I think your "rise in wealth" answer is correct, but note that it is not just people being able to afford a career in the humanities: it's also people who studied STEM/whatever and now have jobs with a bit of free time to spend on reading, or a bit of wealth to donate to keep their culture alive.
First the depth and clarity of thinking by ancient and medieval Indian scholars writing in Sanskrit in relation to key philosophical and existential questions is extraordinary. Personally I am currently inclined to think that the advaita vedanta tradition may have the most accurate understanding of the nature of consciousness I have yet seen. Moreover this tradition is largely based on purely logical arguments, which, while perhaps not 100% convincing to a modern reader, are I think definitely worth exploring.
The above points are perhaps not unrelated to certain features of the Sanskrit language itself, which seems to have a logical structure that is rare or unheard of in other natural languages. The existence of such structure is in large part due to the work of Panini 2500 years ago, as mentioned in the article, but also to later followers who developed a register of Sanskrit that can be compared to modern frameworks for knowledge representation, as discussed in this paper: https://ojs.aaai.org//index.php/aimagazine/article/view/466.
Can you think of any resource that would provide an overview of what you're getting here that doesn't require months of reading? Something to just get one's feet wet, to know what is out there to be learned if one is willing to invest the time?
If you mean more generally the whole of classical Indian philosophical thought it is really a vast subject of which I have barely begun to scrape the surface, so there's not a lot I can recommend there. I'm mostly still at the stage of reading related wikipedia articles.
EDIT: One more thing I should add is that there were also heterodox schools which explicitly rejected some or all of the assumptions of Hinduism (such as reincarnation). For example Charvaka (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charvaka) was a materialist school.
A few years down the line I hope to enter into a guru-shishya (teacher-disciple) regimen to understand more of it, the way it is supposed to be learnt.
For those interested, Aitareya Upanishad by Swami Chinmayanand would be a pretty good book to get started with, it has commentary which most of us should easily understand.
Sanskrit changes the way your brain works as much as Vedanta itself does. The primary purpose of Sanskrit itself is seen as a way for the knowledge of the self to be expressed to the human world.
Its very hard to not accept that this language and the texts were revealed rather than created.
(Hypothesis: if this explanation is correct, I would imagine there has similarly been a rise in the Latin-speaking community: more attendance at Living Latin etc. Looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_Latin gives me the impression this may be true, though I'm not familiar enough to say.)
Can someone explain to me why the breakthrough didn't happen in India?
What I think is that as the language is closely related to the religion, Indian people tend to worship it and hence cannot produce critical and innovative research nowadays. Am I right in thinking this? Or am I making an epistemological oversimplification?
___
> Mr Rajpopat said he had "a eureka moment in Cambridge" after spending nine months "getting nowhere".
>
> "I closed the books for a month and just enjoyed the summer - swimming, cycling, cooking, praying and meditating," he said.
>
> "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."
Diffuse thinking at play.
Happened with me many times.
Many of the brightest students in India go abroad for their PhD studies.
Given that the article says “Indian student Rishi Rajpopat cracked the 2,500-year-old problem” and “I hope this discovery will infuse students in India with confidence, pride and hope that they too can achieve great things," said Mr Rajpopat, from India.” I think this is an example.
But why for Sanskrit, too?
India should be the top place to study Sanskrit and do research in it?
Why is that not the case?
It's always more about the university than the country. India doesn't have a single university that competes with the likes of MIT, Stanford and Cambridge. Naturally, rich and privileged institutes like this occur more in suitably rich countries with high QoL.
I would think that it is like traditional number theory or philosophy research in terms of funding.
Please inform me if I am wrong.
The heart of Sanskrit grammar (articulated by Panini) provides for rule (i.e., sutra) based generation of these 162,00+ forms. However the grammar only has some 4,000 rules (sutras). So Chomsky and others have called it a generative grammar. In addition, the grammar also covers other things like nouns (whose forms i.e., declensions, can all be derived by applying rules of grammar), nominal compounds and various other grammatical categories.
When you derive forms, you have to apply rules. At times, multiple rules are simultaneously applicable. So there's this problem of choice i.e., which is the right rule to choose. Remember the end result is already known from spoken Sanskrit. So the rule that leads you to the right form is the one to be chosen e.g., the plural of 'ox' is 'oxen', not 'oxes'. You are to end up with 'oxen' at the end of the derivational process.
So how do you choose the rule - there are various interpretive devices, some are heuristic (like if the penultimate vowel is like this, do this - Latin students must already start to like this, but there is no antepenult of significance in Sanskrit heh heh), some are phonological (if there's a short vowel at the end of a word, drop it), some are morphological (for instance, the rule that applies to the inside of the word has precedence over the one that operates on the word boundary), or that the particular rule supersedes the general rule etc.
In all instances when you apply interpretive devices to choose a rule, you think like a judge, not a programmer. This is what is the essential difference between Sanskrit grammar's processes and what you find in a program. That's why 'Sanskrit is a programming language' bozos have not created anything of value up until now. Nor will they, in most Sanskritists' view.
Adverting to this thesis and its Eureka moment (I want to kill myself), it takes the view that a central interpretive device in traditional Sanskrit grammar has been wrongly understood and that all the Sanskrit grammarians of some 24 odd centuries were totally out to lunch.
Rajpopat has in his thesis a handful of trivially simple examples, mainly nouns, where his 'correct' interpretation works. Nobody has applied his interpretive device to all the nouns. His method will reduce false positives in a small amount of known examples but would generate myriad false negatives everywhere else. As to the verbal system in Sanskrit, it's so complicated that the derivational processes really require a legal mind. Wisely, Rajpopat sticks to mainly nominal forms in his thesis. As a trivial example, his method may generate 'speeched' as the participial form 'speak' rather than 'spoken' or may generate even 'spought', analogous to 'sought' as the participial form of 'seek'.
I still feel however that his method, after much refinement, may have some utility for machine generation of certain derivations of verbal and nominal forms because it might have a simpler heuristic for conflict resolution in the event of rule conflict. But remember the traditional grammar does it already and has been doing it since Panini wrote his grammar :)
The rest of it is just baseless Cambridge hubris aided by some real high class publicity blitz of the type Cambridge Analytica would have been proud of. Needless to say, Indian media have swallowed it all :) Indians, in general, know no more Sanskrit than a plumber in Chilicothe, OH knows Mycenaean Greek.
Just my 2c.
If there are exceptions, I would think the problem isn’t solved. Perhaps the article is being loose with the wording. Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.
But almost means one can easily list the remaining special cases.
If that is not good enough, I suspect that no possible answer would prove to be satisfactory.
If you want to construct the entire field of linguistics mathematically that would certainly be interesting to watch. Since a function that is described by a simple equation is mathematically equivalent to a function that is described by a table assigning the appropriate values to each element of the function domain, you could try to come up with a definition for what constitutes the "optimal" way to describe a function. Do the same for any kind of relation.
Until you've done so linguists will sadly be stuck applying nothing more than common sense.
Moose -> moose Goose -> geese House -> houses Mouse -> mice Etc.