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Ancient grammatical puzzle solved after 2,500 years

phys.org

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Re: Ancient grammatical puzzle solved after 2,500 years

#51

Post by uptownfunk »

What fascinating is that you have the famed muni-traya, Panini, Katyayan, and Patanjali. How could this be unadressed and unsolved by even Katyayan and Patanjali, and unaddressed in the Kasika, yet it took 2500 years later for a Cambridge phd candidate to crack it. If this is really the case, the man deserves much more than a PhD.

Furthermore Panini is predated by Yaskacharya and cites his famous Nirukta, which is still available today. Panini also cites other ancient grammars in his work. So the history goes back even further. It is remarkable that such fundamental discoveries are being made so many years later.

Re: Ancient grammatical puzzle solved after 2,500 years

#52

Post by fooker »

bakul wrote: post #35

As I understand it, this rule allows one to have an unambiguous parse of a sanskrit sentence into its constituent parts (it feels a bit like "the longest prefix match" rule used in packet forwarding!). My question is, did Pāṇini not specify this rule in his 3959 sūtras or was it somehow missed? [Edit: covered in Rajpopat's thesis...]

It was not missed, just allegedly misinterpreted.

The rules are not fully elaborated, we just have mnemonics similar to how children are taught trigonometric identities.

Re: Ancient grammatical puzzle solved after 2,500 years

#53

Post by quickthrower2 »

satvikpendem wrote: post #15
addaon wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. It is not obvious to me that, across the total number of human minds produced so far, an outlier like Newton has any reasonable probability of existing.

Well there are a lot of polymaths though, Newton really is not that special. von Neumann, Feynman, Ben Franklin, Steve Jobs etc come to mind.

Erdős, Feynman?

Re: Ancient grammatical puzzle solved after 2,500 years

#54

Post by spaceman_2020 »

danans wrote: post #50

Something glossed over by articles like this that discuss "Sanskrit" as a singular language is that prior to Panini, the spoken Vedic Sanskrit language was far less codified and rules-based, and replete with swashbuckling irregular grammatical and phonetic forms that were in free variation, and often used for rhythmic or poetic effect, just as in living spoken languages today. It was a campfire language, not a schola…

Was this the reason for slow death of Sanskrit as a living language? Too codified and "pure"?

Hindi thrives precisely because its very happy to borrow words from anywhere and everywhere.

Re: Ancient grammatical puzzle solved after 2,500 years

#55

Post by spaceman_2020 »

saimiam wrote: post #37

As an Indian, Rajpopat’s this comment struck a chord - > Some of the most ancient wisdom of India has been produced in Sanskrit and we still don't fully understand what our ancestors achieved. We've often been led to believe that we're not important, that we haven't brought enough to the table. I hope this discovery will infuse students in India with confidence, pride, and hope that they too can achieve great things.…

If you were living in India in, say, 1250 CE, you might have looked at present day Greece or Italy or Germany and wondered the same.

History is very long. Human memory very short. Civilizations have their crests and their troughs. What's up today might be down tomorrow

Re: Ancient grammatical puzzle solved after 2,500 years

#56

Post by danans »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #54
danans wrote: post #50

Something glossed over by articles like this that discuss "Sanskrit" as a singular language is that prior to Panini, the spoken Vedic Sanskrit language was far less codified and rules-based, and replete with swashbuckling irregular grammatical and phonetic forms that were in free variation, and often used for rhythmic or poetic effect, just as in living spoken languages today. It was a campfire language, not a schola…

Was this the reason for slow death of Sanskrit as a living language? Too codified and "pure"? Hindi thrives precisely because its very happy to borrow words from anywhere and everywhere.

> Was this the reason for slow death of Sanskrit as a living language?

To use a software analogy, liturgical languages like Classical Sanskrit (and Latin and Greek, etc) got "forked" from their messy spoken source language and then "refactored".

I don't think that their formalization necessarily caused their death as spoken languages any more than the natural processes by which spoken languages change over time.

Some of those processes are internal to the language, and some are caused by the influence of other languages in the region (i.e. Dravidian for Sanskrit, Etruscan for Latin, and Minoan for Greek).

> Too codified and "pure"?

I'd say that since learning it came to require studying it (since it stopped being learned "naturally" as a primary language), it just wasn't accessible to most people. Broad accessibility was after all a non-goal of the codified language.

And while it was codified grammatically, it was certainly not "pure" from that point on. Even after its grammatical codification, Classical Sanskrit admitted a lot of lexical influence from other languages, which allowed it to become the lingua franca of scholarship, statecraft, and literature (not just religion as we tend to think today) across the Subcontinent.

In that sense, it was very much "alive", but maybe wasn't used for things like buying milk at the market.

Re: Ancient grammatical puzzle solved after 2,500 years

#57

Post by naruvimama »

saimiam wrote: post #37

As an Indian, Rajpopat’s this comment struck a chord - > Some of the most ancient wisdom of India has been produced in Sanskrit and we still don't fully understand what our ancestors achieved. We've often been led to believe that we're not important, that we haven't brought enough to the table. I hope this discovery will infuse students in India with confidence, pride, and hope that they too can achieve great things.…

No post body was provided.

Re: Ancient grammatical puzzle solved after 2,500 years

#58

Post by hn_go_brrrrr »

justsomehnguy wrote: post #39
b0afc375b5 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a specific term for this subconscious phenomenon? I believe I have experienced this multiple times, but I remember one event in particular when I couldn't solve a book exercise for several hours, I slept in frustration. When I woke up I knew the answer immediately as if it was obvious.

> I slept in frustration Human brain runs a defrag process (quite literally) when the body sleeps. Not only this removes the cruft from the day but also rearranges and makes links for the knowledge gathered through the day .

Is glymphatic cleaning related to knowledge retention?

Re: Ancient grammatical puzzle solved after 2,500 years

#60

Post by canadianfella »

satvikpendem wrote: post #15
addaon wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. It is not obvious to me that, across the total number of human minds produced so far, an outlier like Newton has any reasonable probability of existing.

Well there are a lot of polymaths though, Newton really is not that special. von Neumann, Feynman, Ben Franklin, Steve Jobs etc come to mind.

Jobs? What the hell?
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