Indian student at Cambridge decodes over 2,500-year-old Sanskrit grammatical problem

A Cambridge University PhD student has solved the grammatical problem that scholars since the 5th century BC could not decode. Rishi Rajpopat, age 27, has reportedly decoded a text written by the Sanskrit language master Panini. Master Panini lived around two-and-a-half-thousand years ago.

Aṣṭādhyāyī of Panini, which is a set of rules to derive or form new words from root words, as per scholars, contains conflicting rules because of which many scholars have been confused about what rules to use in order to create new words.

Paṇini wrote a meta-rule to decode the rule conflicts in the linguistic algorithm, which so far has been interpreted as- In the event of a conflict between two rules of equal strength, the rule that comes later in the grammar’s serial order wins.

However, Rajpopat has argued that this metarule has been historically misunderstood. According to him, what Paṇini meant was that between rules applicable to the left and right sides of a word, the language master wanted the reader to choose the rule applicable to the right side, as reported by the British newspaper The Independent.

And, by this logic, Rajpopat found that Paṇini’s algorithms can actually produce grammatically correct words and sentences without errors.

For instance, in the sentence jñānaṁ dīyate guruṇā — knowledge (jñānaṁ) is given (dīyate) by the guru (guruṇā) — there is a rule conflict when you try to form the word guruṇā. The word means ‘by the guru’ and is a well-known word.

The word comprises the roots, guru + ā. If gone by Paṇini’s rules to create the word that will mean “by the guru”, there are two rules that are applicable — one to the word 'guru', and one to 'ā'. The conflict can be resolved by picking the rule that is applicable to the word on the right, which results in the correct new form guruṇā.

Young Rajpopat’s work comes as a rebuttal to scholars who have been trying for over two and a half millennia.

Scholars including Jayaditya and Vamana in their commentary treatise Kāśikāvṛttī, Patanjali in his Mahābhāṣya, and Katyayana in his Vārttikakāra have tried to resolve the rule conflicts.

As per Rajagopat, his discovery was the proverbial 'eureka' moment. “I had a eureka moment in Cambridge. After nine 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 summer, swimming, cycling, cooking, praying and meditating," he told The Independent.

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