If you’re working on an intellectual problem that hasn’t been solved for millennia, try taking a few months off and spending your time doing activities like swimming or meditating. This strategy worked for Rishi Lajpopat, a doctoral student at Cambridge University. After taking a summer off to do activities unrelated to his studies, he reread the texts of the ancient grammarian, logician, and “father of linguistics,” Panini, and found them newly understandable. Its rules of construction have puzzled scholars for 2,500 years, but as Lajpopat writes in his book, Tom Almeros Williams’ article on the Cambridge University website“I turned the pages and within minutes these patterns started to emerge and it all started to make sense.”
Panini used a kind of algorithm to create texts: “You take word stems and suffixes, and a step-by-step process transforms them into grammatically correct words and sentences,” writes Almeros Williams. But “in many cases, two or more of Panini’s rules are applied simultaneously in the same step, leaving scholars confused as to which one to choose.” At least, that was until Lajipopat discovered that the hard-to-interpret “meta-rules” that apply in such cases “demand that of rules that can be applied to the left and right sides of a word, Panini chooses the rule that applies to the right side.”
For those unfamiliar with Sanskrit structures, this may not be immediately clear, but Armeroth Williams’ article uses the following example to explain: MantraA word from a language that everyone knows.Devaav Prasannav Mantraikha(“The Gods [devāḥ] Happy [prasannāḥ] By Mantra [mantraiḥ]’) A “rule conflict” is encountered during derivation Mantrai,’“By mantra,” he writes, “the origin of which isMantra + Bis.‘ One rule applies to the left side.Mantra And the other one on the right side.bis.“You need to choose the rule that applies to the correct part ‘bhis’ that gives the correct form.”Mantrah“
Applying this rule, the interpretation of Pānini’s writings becomes almost perfectly clear and grammatical. Lajpopat points out that this rule can also be used to teach Sanskrit grammar to computers programmed for natural language processing. It undoubtedly took some intensive research before I was able to discover the true meaning of Pānini’s clear meta-rules, which did not emerge until I tried them out with my unconscious mind. As I have said before in Open Culture, there is a good reason why we think best when we are walking, taking a shower, etc. This is a phenomenon that philosophers have long recognized and the great Pānini himself probably understood.
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Based in Seoul, Colin MaOnershall Writing and broadcastingHe has written papers on cities, languages, and cultures, and his projects include the Substack newsletter. Books about cities And books A city without a state: Walking through 21st-century Los Angeles. Follow us on Twitter CollinhamOnershall or Facebook.
Source: Open Culture – www.openculture.com
