Indian PhD Student at Cambridge Cracks 2,500-Year-Old Sanskrit Puzzle

A Sanskrit grammatical problem that kept scholars bemused since the 5th century BC has been finally been deciphered by an Indian PhD student Rishi Rajpopat at the University of Cambridge.

He has solved a rule taught by Sanskrit grammarian and language master Panini who lived more than two and a half thousand years ago.

Mr Rajpopat is a 27-year-old student at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies in St. John’s College, Cambridge. Sanskrit is now spoken by only 25,000 people in India. This achievement can revolutionise the study of Sanskrit.

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Panini’s Asthadhyayi relied on an algorithm-like system to turn the base and suffix of a word into grammatically correct words and sentences. He taught a metarule which the Sanskrit scholars traditionally interpreted as “when two rules of equal strength conflict, the rule that comes later in the grammar’s serial order prevails”.This deduction often led to grammatically incorrect deductions.

Mr Rajpopat denounced this traditional interpretation of the metarule. Instead, he concluded that Panini meant that between the rules applicable to the left and right sides of a word respectively, Panini wanted us to choose the rule applicable to the right side. When he employed this interpretation, he found that Panini’s language machine produced grammatically correct words without any exception.

He calls this the “eureka moment in Cambridge”. After toiling for nine months to crack this code, he was almost ready to quit as it led him to nowhere. He closed his books for a month and got involved in other activities. When he finally went back to his work begrudgingly,  within a few moments these patterns started emerging and it started creating sense. He devoted another two years to solve the problem.

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Vincenzo Vergiani, his supervisor at Cambridge believes that this discovery will revolutionise the study of the language at a time when interest in Sanskrit is on a rise.

Source: NDTV, BBC News