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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

#61

Post by rep_movsd »

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.

Hindi is relatively new - Its changed a lot since teh start.

I doubt that most Hindi speakers today would easily grok the dialect spoken during the Delhi Sultanate

Sanskrit remains understandable after 4000 years

Re: Ancient grammatical puzzle solved after 2,500 years

#62

Post by Vetch »

b0afc375b5 wrote: post #26
satvikpendem wrote: post #10

> Six months before Rajpopat made his discovery, his supervisor at Cambridge, Vincenzo Vergiani, Professor of Sanskrit, gave him some prescient advice: "If the solution is complicated, you are probably wrong." > Rajpopat said, "I had a eureka moment in Cambridge. After 9 months trying to crack this problem, I was almost ready to quit, I was getting nowhere. So I closed the books for a month and just enjoyed the summe…

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.

Perhaps the Eureka effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureka_effect)?

Re: Ancient grammatical puzzle solved after 2,500 years

#63

Post by bambax »

satvikpendem wrote: post #10

> Six months before Rajpopat made his discovery, his supervisor at Cambridge, Vincenzo Vergiani, Professor of Sanskrit, gave him some prescient advice: "If the solution is complicated, you are probably wrong." > Rajpopat said, "I had a eureka moment in Cambridge. After 9 months trying to crack this problem, I was almost ready to quit, I was getting nowhere. So I closed the books for a month and just enjoyed the summe…

> I (and probably every programmer (or mathematician, physicist, carpenter, or problem solver) on the planet) have felt this effect first-hand. Incredible how well the brain can collate and sift through information if you just give it the space to do so.

This is so. much. true. Curiously, it's very well known and yet ignored most of the time, for some reason.

For simpler problems, a night sleep can be enough. Just tell your brain to work on it before you go to sleep and the solution will be ready for you by breakfast, like magic.

Or sometimes, a walk in the park.

"Give your brain some space" should be taught in every school and yet many times we tell kids the opposite.

Re: Ancient grammatical puzzle solved after 2,500 years

#64

Post by lumb63 »

satvikpendem wrote: post #10

> Six months before Rajpopat made his discovery, his supervisor at Cambridge, Vincenzo Vergiani, Professor of Sanskrit, gave him some prescient advice: "If the solution is complicated, you are probably wrong." > Rajpopat said, "I had a eureka moment in Cambridge. After 9 months trying to crack this problem, I was almost ready to quit, I was getting nowhere. So I closed the books for a month and just enjoyed the summe…

The book “Why We Sleep” discusses this. I believe it was Thomas Edison (I could be wrong) would fall asleep with a pan next to his chair, his hand over the pan, and his hand full of marbles. When he’d fall asleep, his muscles would relax and he’d drop the marbles, waking him up. He used it to harvest ideas.

Re: Ancient grammatical puzzle solved after 2,500 years

#65

Post by HelloNurse »

hota_mazi wrote: post #34
shib71 wrote: post #3

> "If the solution is complicated, you are probably wrong." True in so many situations, Vincenzo.

Quoted post unavailable.

If a problem has a complicated solution, it is a complicated problem to begin with.

In this case, we have a much stronger guarantee of simplicity than, for example, with mathematical problems that are easy to explain but might lead into unexplored territory: a missing piece in Panini's treatise is something that he definitely figured out in his time, so it is well within the reach of today's linguists.

Re: Ancient grammatical puzzle solved after 2,500 years

#67

Post by Aardwolf »

The algorithm was made 2500 years ago, but was it already a problem/puzzle back then? Were scholars already immediately misinterpreting it? I mean, at least the person who wrote it understood it correctly I assume?

Also I'm not sure if I'm understanding everything correctly about the Sanskrit language: does this algorithm define the Sanskrit language, or was this algorithm made to try to describe the Sanskrit language? Usually languages have way too many exceptions to be distilled into simple rules, how was this possible here? It's not a spoken language?

Re: Ancient grammatical puzzle solved after 2,500 years

#68

Post by tsavo »

satvikpendem wrote: post #10

> Six months before Rajpopat made his discovery, his supervisor at Cambridge, Vincenzo Vergiani, Professor of Sanskrit, gave him some prescient advice: "If the solution is complicated, you are probably wrong." > Rajpopat said, "I had a eureka moment in Cambridge. After 9 months trying to crack this problem, I was almost ready to quit, I was getting nowhere. So I closed the books for a month and just enjoyed the summe…

Having written a few papers using a similar effect. While I may thoroughly research when fully awake, I would wait until exhausted to write observations. Falling asleep while writing, I would continue to write in my sleep. You can see in my notes the moment I fell asleep as my handwriting style would change and still be legible. When I'd wake up, I wouldn't remember everything I had thought about but it'd still be in my sleep notes.

Re: Ancient grammatical puzzle solved after 2,500 years

#69

Post by pessimizer »

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.

Wasn't Hindi's origin an intentional purge of Persian influences from Urdu?

Re: Ancient grammatical puzzle solved after 2,500 years

#70

Post by kazinator »

> Rajpopat rejects this [later rule precedence], arguing instead that Pāṇini meant that between rules applicable to the left and right sides of a word respectively, Pāṇini wanted us to choose the rule applicable to the right side. Employing this interpretation, Rajpopat found Pāṇini's language machine produced grammatically correct words with almost no exceptions

I feel like if this had been in the hands of CS people, it would have been figured out by 1965.

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