PhD student solves 2,500-year-old Sanskrit problem

A Sanskrit grammar problem that has puzzled scholars since the 5th century B.C. B.C., was solved by a Cambridge University PhD student.

Rishi Rajpopat, 27, deciphered a rule taught by Panini, a master of the ancient Sanskrit language who lived some 2,500 years ago.

Sanskrit is spoken in India by an estimated 25,000 people out of a population of more than a billion, the university said.

Mr Rajpopat said he had “an aha moment at Cambridge” after spending nine months with “getting nowhere”.

“I closed the books for a month and just enjoyed the summer — swimming, biking, cooking, praying and meditating,” he said.

“Then I reluctantly went back to work, and within minutes, as I turned the pages, these patterns began to emerge and everything began to make sense.”

He said he “would spend hours in the library, even in the middle of the night,” but still had two and a half years to work on the problem.

Although Sanskrit is not widely spoken, it is the sacred language of Hinduism and has been used in India’s science, philosophy, poetry and other secular literature over the centuries.

Panini’s grammar, known as Astadhyayi, relied on a system that worked like an algorithm to convert a word’s base and suffix into grammatically correct words and sentences.

However, two or more Panini rules often apply at the same time, which leads to conflicts.

Panini taught a “metarule” which has traditionally been interpreted by scholars as meaning that “in the event of a conflict between two rules of equal strength, the rule which comes later in the serial order of the grammar wins”.

However, this often led to grammatically incorrect results.

Mr. Rajpopat rejected the traditional interpretation of the meta-rule. Instead, he argued that Panini meant that Panini wanted us to choose the rule that applies to the right side of a word between rules that apply to the left and right side respectively.

With this interpretation, he found that Panini’s “language machine” produced grammatically correct words almost without exception.

“I hope this discovery will infuse students in India with confidence, pride and hope that they too can achieve great things,” said Mr. Rajpopat from India.

His superior at Cambridge, Professor of Sanskrit Vincenzo Vergiani, said: “He has found an extraordinarily elegant solution to a problem that has puzzled scholars for centuries.

“This discovery will revolutionize the study of Sanskrit at a time when interest in the language is increasing.”

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