This is the story of an inspirational moment. From a ‘eureka’ moment. And their hero is a student at Cambridge University in England and an ancient language. Currently, only a few thousand people in India speak Sanskrit, which is ridiculous in a country with a population of close to 1.4 billion.

However, this does not mean that this language is dead. Not even nearly dead. And yet, despite being used by very few people on the entire planet, it retains intact its status as the sacred instrument of Hinduism, a religion whose tradition goes back thousands of years and is practiced by more than 1,300 million people today. . .

Additionally, this may sound like anecdotal, but in reality it is not. language used in yoga. This prevalence has led almost all of us to unknowingly include some words borrowed from Sanskrit into our vocabulary, for example, guru, avatar anyone mixed. What is interesting and this is where our adventure begins, is that the grammar of this language is extremely complex.

Panini’s language machine could not be deciphered. Until now

Panini was a Sanskrit scholar living in India in the 5th century BC, and history remembers him as the most famous grammarian specializing in this language. Its greatest contribution was the nearly 4,000 grammatical rules collected in a text called Astadhyayi, which frustrated hundreds of academics from the time it emerged.

Panini’s rules suggest an efficient method for forming Sanskrit words and phrases, but so far they have had a problem: often two or more of these rules can be applied simultaneously in the same context, and Panini does not seem to express it with absolute clarity. what to do in these situations. In what order should these rules be applied when there are several places and we want to get a grammatically correct result?

In the more than 2,500 years since Astadhyayi came to light, many Sanskrit scholars have proposed interpretations of the Panini machine that probably resolved the interference of some rules with others, but none of these suggestions have been proven correct. Until now.

And Rishi Rajpopat, an Indian student doing his PhD at Cambridge University, has shown that his strategy is correct when interpreting the Panini rules. His research took several years and he was apparently about to throw in the towel many times, but unexpectedly and in a moment of inspiration, came up with the solution.

Its algorithm effectively resolves conflicts that arise when applying various Panini machine rules, making it possible to create grammatically perfect words and expressions. This finding will enable us to better understand ancient texts written in Sanskrit and may also lead to the development of natural language processing with computers in the future. Regardless, there is one thing that is not debatable: Sanskrit has a tightrope for a while.

Cover photo: Welcome Pictures

More information: Cambridge University