Solving a 2,500-Year-Old Puzzle: How a Cambridge Student Cracked an Ancient Sanskrit Code

If you find your­self grap­pling with an intel­lec­tu­al prob­lem that’s gone unsolved for mil­len­nia, try tak­ing a few months off and spend­ing them on activ­i­ties like swim­ming and med­i­tat­ing. That very strat­e­gy worked for a Cam­bridge PhD stu­dent named Rishi Rajpopat, who, after a sum­mer of non-research-relat­ed activ­i­ties, returned to a text by the ancient gram­mar­i­an, logi­cian, and “father of lin­guis­tics” Pāṇi­ni and found it new­ly com­pre­hen­si­ble. The rules of its com­po­si­tion had stumped schol­ars for 2,500 years, but, as Rajpopat tells it in an arti­cle by Tom Almeroth-Williams at Cam­bridge’s web­site, “With­in min­utes, as I turned the pages, these pat­terns start­ed emerg­ing, and it all start­ed to make sense.”

Pāṇi­ni com­posed his texts using a kind of algo­rithm: “Feed in the base and suf­fix of a word and it should turn them into gram­mat­i­cal­ly cor­rect words and sen­tences through a step-by-step process,” writes Almeroth-Williams. But “often, two or more of Pāṇini’s rules are simul­ta­ne­ous­ly applic­a­ble at the same step, leav­ing schol­ars to ago­nize over which one to choose.” Or such was the case, at least, before Rajpopat’s dis­cov­ery that the dif­fi­cult-to-inter­pret “metarule” meant to apply to such cas­es dic­tates 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.”

That may not be imme­di­ate­ly under­stand­able to those unfa­mil­iar with the struc­ture of San­skrit. Almeroth-Williams’ piece clar­i­fies with an exam­ple using  mantra, one word from the lan­guage that every­body knows. “In the sen­tence ‘devāḥ prasan­nāḥ mantraiḥ’ (‘The Gods [devāḥ] are pleased [prasan­nāḥ] by the mantras [mantraiḥ]’) we encounter ‘rule con­flict’ when deriv­ing mantraiḥ, ‘by the mantras,’ ” he writes. ” The deriva­tion starts with ‘mantra + bhis. One rule is applic­a­ble to the left part ‘mantra’ and the oth­er to right part ‘bhis.’ We must pick the rule applic­a­ble to the right part ‘bhis,’ which gives us the cor­rect form ‘mantraih.’ ”

Apply­ing this rule ren­ders inter­pre­ta­tions of Pāṇini’s work almost com­plete­ly unam­bigu­ous and gram­mat­i­cal. It could even be employed, Rajpopat has not­ed, to teach San­skrit gram­mar to com­put­ers being pro­grammed for nat­ur­al lan­guage pro­cess­ing. It no doubt took him a great deal of inten­sive study to reach the point where he was able to dis­cov­er the true mean­ing of Pāṇini’s clar­i­fy­ing metarule, but it did­n’t tru­ly present itself until he let his uncon­scious mind take a crack at it. As we’ve said here on Open Cul­ture before, there are good rea­sons we do our best think­ing while doing things like walk­ing or tak­ing a show­er, a phe­nom­e­non that philoso­phers have broad­ly rec­og­nized through the ages — and, like as not, was under­stood by the great Pāṇi­ni him­self.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Learn Latin, Old Eng­lish, San­skrit, Clas­si­cal Greek & Oth­er Ancient Lan­guages in 10 Lessons

Intro­duc­tion to Indi­an Phi­los­o­phy: A Free Online Course

Can Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Deci­pher Lost Lan­guages? Researchers Attempt to Decode 3500-Year-Old Ancient Lan­guages

Why Algo­rithms Are Called Algo­rithms, and How It All Goes Back to the Medieval Per­sian Math­e­mati­cian Muham­mad al-Khwariz­mi

How Schol­ars Final­ly Deci­phered Lin­ear B, the Old­est Pre­served Form of Ancient Greek Writ­ing

Has the Voyn­ich Man­u­script Final­ly Been Decod­ed?: Researchers Claim That the Mys­te­ri­ous Text Was Writ­ten in Pho­net­ic Old Turk­ish

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.


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Comments (10)
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  • Sarma Pisapati says:

    I am won­der­ing whether Pani­ni wrote in Devana­gari script. I guessed that the script was in Brah­mi

  • IqbL says:

    If evi­dence talks then the hybrid Bud­dhist san­skrit was in dhamm script (lipi) . From 1st cen­tu­ry AD. Clas­sic san­skrit what we see today with Brah­min books is in Devana­gari script from 11 cen­tu­ry AD.

  • Jake Kwon says:

    Lan­guage seems to some kind of holy code Since Cyankskrit shares the same DNA per­haps we would observe sim­i­lar rules oper­at­ing in mod­ern lan­guages of today. The Hangul font is remark­ably child-like and the Ankh script of Enkhlish remains inter­wo­ven. Peo­ple argue about the old­est to gue on earth but it real­ly does­nt mat­ter. Broth­er be loved well.

  • Silver Wolf says:

    I know it works for me. I call it a “brain break”.

  • Suraj maharjan says:

    And the pic­ture was from Nepal which is not that old not even 200 years old. 🤣🤣

  • Chhanda Sarkar says:

    The Arti­cle is mis­lead­ing in a grand way. The way it was writ­ten is com­plete­ly unschol­ar­ly. Has writer on 1st place put for­ward any evi­dence that San­skrit wasa lan­guage even at start­ing of Chris­t­ian era. The para­mount point is the script. There word to word or struc­ture expla­na­tion could­n’t based upon when there is no prac­ti­cal­i­ty of it’s exis­tence. And Pani­ni , who was, which era ‚which Lan­guage and from where it bring on the table to dis­cuss 🤔. We want a com­pre­hen­sive dis­cus­sion with bib­li­o­graph­i­cal ref­er­ence. Oth­er­wise, there will be long Way to keep to mis­in­formed in all through the aca­d­e­m­ic arcana.

  • Gajendra Kumar Jain says:

    Maharshi Katyayana, Maharshi Patan­jali, maharshi Vyaa­di and even Acharya Hemachan­dra Suri (of 12th cen­tu­ry AD) have accept­ed many Metarules (Parib­hashas) to jus­ti­fy the pro­vi­sions made with the Gen­er­al rules and exce­tions. If a sin­gle equa­tion giv­en by Rishi Rajpopat is prop­er then all the author­i­ties are being proved fool.
    I have thor­ough­ly gone throgh the dis­ser­ta­tion and tried to under­stand the hypoth­e­sis of Mr. Rajpopat. Here and there, he had also accept­ed the imper­fect­ness of his ideas.
    I am of opin­ion that every Metarule must be assessed on the ground pro­posed by Rishi Rajpopat, and if found cor­rect, then only it may be claimed.
    In my kwnoledge, till now, not a sin­gle per­son (San­skrit gram­mar­i­an) has been tried to assess the solu­tion giv­en by Rishi Rajpopat (right to left, that stands with Devana­gari Script only). How­ev­er many zea­li­cious per­sons have made com­ments abus­ing him, it is also not appre­cia­ble.

  • Gajendra Kumar Jain says:

    So far as, the avail­abilty of lit­er­a­ture is con­cerned, no doubt, script­ed San­skrit lit­er­a­ture appears near 7th cen­tu­ry, but the prop­er name of Ashoken script is not ‘Dham­ma’ as is being pro­pogat­ed now-a-days. It’s prop­er name is Brah­mi (Bamb­hi in prakrit). The term ‘Lipi’ has fem­i­n­i­ty in itself, where­as ‘Dhamm’ (Dhar­ma in San­skrit) belongs to mesculine/neuter gen­der. Because the adjec­tive must have gen­der sim­i­lar to (agreemet with) the noun, and that’s why, Dhamm can not be an adjec­tive of Lipi.
    I have read that shlo­ka in which the term ‘dham­malipi’ is used to denote an arti­cle but not a script.

  • Mukunda Jwalananda says:

    Agreed with Suraj Mahar­jan

  • Purushothaman AJ says:

    This claim of crack­ing 2500 years puz­zle is fake. There is noth­ing unre­solved in Pani­ni. If I don’t learn prop­er­ly every thing remains only puz­zle to me. This false pos­i­tive has been dis­cussed in forums and schol­ars and videos are avail­able in you tube.

    If you look from non Bhara­teeya per­spec­tive every­thing would look trash. But the reverse would throw prop­er light under trained hands

    It is high time peo­ple stopped trad­ing cul­ture and dig­ni­ty for pal­try degrees.

    The indi­vid­ual may not have any dig­ni­ty but only degree like a gro­cery list but cul­ture and Bhara­teeya sub­jects are just excel­lent.

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