{"id":218841,"date":"2022-12-17T19:40:14","date_gmt":"2022-12-17T14:10:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.forumias.com\/?p=218841"},"modified":"2022-12-17T19:40:14","modified_gmt":"2022-12-17T14:10:14","slug":"2500-year-old-puzzle-solved-by-indian-student","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/2500-year-old-puzzle-solved-by-indian-student\/","title":{"rendered":"2,500-year-old puzzle solved by Indian student"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Source: <\/b>The post is based on the article <\/span>\u201c2,500-year-old puzzle solved by Indian student\u201d <\/b>published in <\/span>The Hindu <\/b>on 17th December 2022<\/b><\/p>\n

What is the News?<\/b><\/h5>\n

In his PhD thesis, Cambridge scholar Dr Rishi Rajpopat claims to have solved Sanskrit\u2019s biggest puzzle\u2014a grammar problem found in the \u2018Ashtadhyayi<\/strong>\u2019, an ancient text written by the scholar Panini towards the end of the 4th century BC.<\/span><\/p>\n

What exactly was the problem?<\/b><\/h5>\n

Ashtadhyayi was written more than 2,000 years ago. It is a linguistics text that set the standard for how Sanskrit was meant to be written and spoken.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It delves deep into the language\u2019s phonetics, syntax and grammar, and also offers a \u2018language machine\u2019, where one can feed in the root and suffix of any Sanskrit word and get grammatically correct words and sentences in return.<\/span><\/p>\n

To ensure this \u2018machine\u2019 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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

To resolve this, Panini had provided a \u2018meta-rule<\/strong>\u2019 (a rule governing rules), which had historically been interpreted as: <\/span>\u2018In the event of a conflict between two rules of equal strength, the rule that comes later in the serial order of the \u2018Ashtadhyayi\u2019 wins\u2019.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

However, following this interpretation also did not solve the machine\u2019s problem.<\/span><\/p>\n

How did Dr Rishi Rajpopat solve this problem?<\/b><\/h5>\n

In his thesis titled \u2018In Panini We Trust\u2019, Dr 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

Using this logic, he found that the \u2018Ashtadhyayi\u2019 could finally become an accurate \u2018language machine\u2019, producing grammatically sound words and sentences almost every time.<\/span><\/p>\n

The discovery now makes it possible to construct millions of Sanskrit words using Panini\u2019s system\u2014and since his grammar rules were exact and formulaic, they can act as a Sanskrit language algorithm that can be taught to computers.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Source: The post is based on the article \u201c2,500-year-old puzzle solved by Indian student\u201d published in The Hindu on 17th December 2022 What is the News? In his PhD thesis, Cambridge scholar Dr Rishi Rajpopat claims to have solved Sanskrit\u2019s biggest puzzle\u2014a grammar problem found in the \u2018Ashtadhyayi\u2019, an ancient text written by the scholar… Continue reading 2,500-year-old puzzle solved by Indian student<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10317,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1566,11212,7965,9],"tags":[10498],"class_list":["post-218841","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daily-factly-articles","category-history-and-art-culture-in-news","category-miscellaneous-daily-factly-articles","category-public","tag-the-hindu","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","views":{"total":0,"cached_at":"","cached_date":1700908778},"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218841","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10317"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=218841"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218841\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=218841"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=218841"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=218841"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}