Ashtadhyayi

Ashtadhyayi

Why in News?

  • Cambridge scholar Dr Rishi Rajpopat’s has recently claimed to have solved Sanskrit’s biggest puzzle—a grammar problem found in the ‘Ashtadhyayi’.

Highlights

  • Written more than 2,000 years ago, Ashtadhyayi or ‘Eight Chapters’, is an ancient text written by the scholar Panini towards the end of the 4th century BC.
  • It is a linguistic text that set the standard for how Sanskrit was meant to be written and spoken.
  • It delves deep into the language’s phonetics, syntax and grammar, and also offers a ‘language machine’, where one can feed in the root and suffix of any Sanskrit word, and get grammatically correct words and sentences in return.
  • The Ashtadhyayi laid down more than 4,000 grammatical rules.
  • Later Indian grammars such as the Mahabhasya of Patanjali (2nd century BC) and the Kasika Vritti of Jayaditya and Vamana (7th century AD), were mostly commentaries on Panini.
  • In Ashtadhyayi, there were two or more of the rules of Grammar that could apply at the same time, causing confusion.
  • To resolve this, Panini had provided a ‘meta-rule’ (a rule governing rules), which had historically been interpreted as- In the event of a conflict between two rules of equal strength, the rule that comes later in the serial order of the ‘Ashtadhyayi’ wins.
  • However, it kept producing exceptions, for which scholars had to keep writing additional rules. This is where Dr Rishi Rajpopat’s discovery came through
  • The discovery now makes it possible to construct millions of Sanskrit words using Panini’s system—and since his grammar rules were exact and formulaic, they can act as a Sanskrit language algorithm that can be taught to computers.
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