Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ancient grammatical puzzle solved after 2,500 years

phys.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–77 of 77 posts

Re: Ancient grammatical puzzle solved after 2,500 years

#71

Post by KhoomeiK »

dagmx wrote: post #44
KhoomeiK wrote: post #19

Shameless plug for my talk on the influence of the classical Indian tradition on Western Linguistics & Natural Language Processing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPl17qiaARM

Thanks, that’s a really informative talk. Out of curiosity, how does this new understanding of his texts affect your own research and talk?

Thanks! I'm still working through Rajpopat's thesis, but at a high level, it doesn't particularly "revolutionize" our understanding of the Astadhyayi. It's just further proof of Panini's ingenuity and the consistency & completeness of perhaps the only exhaustive symbolic/computational account of a natural language. Makes me even prouder to consider myself part of this millennia-old linguistic tradition.

Re: Ancient grammatical puzzle solved after 2,500 years

#72

Post by justsomehnguy »

hn_go_brrrrr wrote: post #58
justsomehnguy wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

It's more like they go hand in hand. I wouldn't say what it depends on it, but without it it would much harder to retain and structure new information. It is commonly observed in a long hours jobs and tests what after some time the new info just doesn't get processed properly.

Re: Ancient grammatical puzzle solved after 2,500 years

#73

Post by theagilecoder »

Aardwolf wrote: post #67

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 languag…

No the scholars did not start immediately misinterpreting it. For example, rishi katyayana who came after rishi panini in his commentarty correctly understands the rule but somehow later scholars started misinterpreting it and it carried to this day until rishi rajpopat went back to the original source and deciphered it correctly (such a funny coincidence his first name is rishi lol)

I am not sure I understand your question. Ashtadhyayi was written by rishi panini to probably codify the already spoken sanskrit language under the umbrella of his 4000 rules. Probably he was frustrated by seeing different people speaking the language in different ways so I guess he and the 10 other rishis predating him that he credits in his book started this exercise.

Re: Ancient grammatical puzzle solved after 2,500 years

#74

Post by theagilecoder »

hoten wrote: post #31

Can someone attempt to ELI5/provide more context for why "always choose the right" eluded scholars for so long?

The scholars did not start immediately misinterpreting it. For example, rishi katyayana who came after rishi panini in his commentarty correctly understands the rule but somehow later scholars started misinterpreting it and it carried to this day until rishi rajpopat went back to the original source and deciphered it correctly (such a funny coincidence his first name is rishi lol)

Re: Ancient grammatical puzzle solved after 2,500 years

#75

Post by zeckalpha »

kazinator wrote: post #70

> 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…

Consider that CS was learning from Chomsky in 1965.

Re: Ancient grammatical puzzle solved after 2,500 years

#76

Post by danans »

pessimizer wrote: post #69
spaceman_2020 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The modern official languages Hindi and Urdu are both the result of the politically motivated purging of their respectively "undesired" elements from the language Sprachbund known as Hindustani.

Re: Ancient grammatical puzzle solved after 2,500 years

#77

Post by hi41 »

kweingar wrote: post #12
raydiatian wrote: post #8

1. Why is this on phys.org 2. Why is the writing so dramatic

This was written by Cambridge and published on their website. It was republished by phys.org which aggregates science, research, and tech news. It might be better if the link was changed to the original article on Cambridge’s website: https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/solving-grammars-greatest-puzz...

Thank you so much for posting a link to the original article!
Post reply on HN