Panini’s Ashtadhyayi

Why in news?

• An Indian student claims to have solved Sanskrit’s biggest puzzle—a grammar problem found in the ‘Ashtadhyayi’.

More about the News:

• 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—and since his grammar rules were exact and formulaic, they can act as a Sanskrit language algorithm that can be taught to computers.

About Ashtadhyayi:

• ‘Ashtadhyayi’ or ‘Eight Chapters’ is a linguistics text that set the standard for how Sanskrit was meant to be written and spoken.
• It is authored by Panini
• 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.

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

PRACTICE QUESTION:

Panini’s Ashtadhyayi is an ancient text that dealt with:

(a) Medicine

(b) Astronomy

(c) Philosophy

(d) Grammar

Answer