For context of Non-Indians: though ancient, there is little evidence Sanskrit ever was a common spoken language among laymen. It was the language primarily used for religious purposes. It was/is a language of high culture and political elites.
Coming back to the premise of the paper, the grammar of this language is declared to be sufficiently easy to disambiguify such that it's easier for computers to understand. Just to put it in context, this property is actually a part of many other languages including japanese. Pro tip: Most of japanese grammar can be covered with a handful of BNF grammar! Being an indian I know one other language spoken in the south of India that exhibits this property as well - Tamil. Equally ancient as sanskrit but widely spoken language even as of 2021.
Point being, the intention of the paper, though it sounds benign, there is a political context to it which cannot be set aside completely.
*intellectual purposes. The constant religion-washing of Indian intellectual history is colonial-era propaganda, for lack of a better term. It has gone so far that now the vast majority of people think there is nothing more to India's intellectual past than Hinduism. A very substantive portion of Sanskrit literature, if not the majority, deals with non-religious topics such as linguistics, logic, poetics, astronomy, rhetoric, mineralogy, statecraft, geography, and more.
//A very substantive portion of Sanskrit literature, if not the majority, deals with non-religious topics such as linguistics, logic, poetics, astronomy, rhetoric, mineralogy, statecraft, geography, and more.//
and more source would be nice?
The main reason its not is because none of the literature was for the common man. The sankrit literatures have always been for the elites. It is still considered a sin for millioins of Indians to even read a sanskrit text.
None of the pseudo-sceintific bs counts. Stop saying they had the science in them. Its okay to accept our ancestors were stupid instead of tring to glorify all the pseudo scientific non-sense i.e flying vehicles, cure for cancer. Gimme a break dude.
Linguistics: Astadhyayi of Panini, the first generative grammar and arguably kickstarted the Western structural linguistic tradition via Saussure
Logic: Navya Nyāya developed formal logical approaches and proof paradigms 600 years before the West
Poetics: Pingala mathematically defined poetic meters with combinatorics (DeBruijn Sequences, Pascals triangle, etc) over 2000 years ago and the Sanskrit poetic tradition is widely recognized as one of the most aesthetically sophisticated. Check out the Sisupala Vadha of Magha for crazy poetry stuff.
Astronomy: Gupta-era astronomers developed the base 10 positional numeral system to make calculations easier, and as a result, Indian calendar systems have accounted for the precession of the Earth for over a thousand years
Rhetoric: the Nyāya school developed a formal theory of debate that was used in intellectual circles across the subcontinent for centuries. It enabled debaters to identify argumentative strategies and logical fallacies.
Mineralogy and Geography: there's a lot of Puranic literature about this but I'm personally not too familiar
Statecraft: Kautilya's Arthasastra is the most famous example but there are countless other treatises over the ages discussing politics and warfare
Each of these examples I gave are but a small sample of the work done by Sanskrit intellectuals over the past few millennia. Don't blame your ancestors for your own ignorance.
Thank you for this comment. So true. The colonialists came with their world view, made the Indians feel inferior to subjugate them. Indians in turn have fetishized this colonial view and have self hated on their own culture as a result, to the delight and as intended by colonialists. Part of this self hate is this conflagration of Sanskrit with Hinduism, and while the two were closely related, there is such a rich intellectual culture of Indian thought (Both Sanskrit and non Sanskrit thought) that can be appreciated while still being “modern”, let’s call it. I really wish more Indians would understand this.
But you wonder how the colonialists managed to colonise in the first place...
I mean if the culture is rich and beautiful, it's still useless if it crumbles at the sight of the first merchant ship from thousands of kms away.
Point being, the indian intellectual culture is enjoyable but it did not focus enough on what could have made people able to stay free, and stealing part of the invaders ideas to reinforce the local ability is not bad, it's the only way to resist the next wave.
To simplify grossly: less worship, less obedience, less birth hierarchy, more political alliance with neighbours (so that you're not surrounded by sharks when you're in trouble), more national awareness (opposed to tribal), more ability to quickly iterate even if elders disagree (so that you're the one with a big innovative merchant navy) . It feels that's what made some countries rise super fast and start colonising while others went rotten and self destructed.
My country, France, is a few kms away from England and they stopped being able to colonize us long before India, so what was missing in India, so expensive to invade ? (ofc, France also horribly colonized countries and we should have had the maturity not to, but guess what we told our own protectorates when we came: look at England colonizing your neighbour, let us "protect" you so you can compete...)
"Usefulness" means a great deal more than "reliably repelled invaders".
Many civilizations have collapsed or been subjugated and yet produced lasting useful knowledge and beautiful culture we still use and appreciate today.
If they had a crystal ball they no doubt would have reprioritized some things.
It is military innovation more than anything. If they didn’t have guns and other weapons I don’t think they would have had such an easy time subjugating india.
>The colonialists came with their world view, made the Indians feel inferior to subjugate them.
It is still going on. There is a reason a gang rape in an Indian village becomes global news on BBC and CNN but gang rapes in other countries don't get anywhere the same attention.
The current rape hysteria about India is as old as European colonization and even Karl Marx wrote about:
>During the Indian Rebellion of 1857, known as "India's First War of Independence" to the Indians and as the "Sepoy Mutiny" to the British, Indian sepoys rebelled en masse against the East India Company's rule over India. Incidents of rape committed by Indian sepoys against British women and children were reported in the English press, particularly after British civilians fell into Indian hands after sieges such as at Cawnpore. However, after the rebellion was suppressed, detailed analyses by the British government concluded that although Indian sepoys had engaged in massacres of British civilians after they captured them, there had never been one single instance of war rape committed by the sepoys.[103] One such account published by The Times, regarding an incident where forty-eight British girls as young as fourteen and ten had been raped by the Indian sepoys in Delhi, was criticised as an obvious fabrication by German author Karl Marx, who pointed out that the story was written by a clergyman in Bangalore, while the rebellion was mostly confined to the Punjab region.[104]
This has a modern parallel; anglophone Indian journalists write about local crime in a highly exaggerated manner to get more clicks and views from a global audience.
Just because people are perceiving the "present day right wing [characterizing] Sanskrit", doesn't mean that everyone interprets & connects that with Sanskrit.
I engage with the language through Yoga, mantras and chanting,… and zero politicians interrupt that process, nor do I think about them.
Sanskrit has lived even before humans invented the idea of "the right wing".
Sanskrit is used to refer to several different languages. It's often ambiguous which one people are referring to when they say Sanskrit. Classical Sanskrit is the only one which wasn't spoken as a common language.
Classical Sanskrit -- the language codified by amongst other Panini, around the 5th century BC, which was used for religious and secular purposes for high culture and amongst the political elites.
At this time, some of the other languages now called Sanskrit had turned into the "Middle Indo-Aryan languages", including Pali, and the Prakrits, whose descendents now include the modern Indo-Aryan languages of northern India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka.
Vedic Sanskrit -- the language of the Vedas (1700BC-600BC, approximately), believed in its earliest forms to be the common languages which then became some of the modern north Indian languages. Classical Sanskrit is a codification of Vedic Sanskrit.
Broadly -- any Old Indo-Aryan language, including the pieces of Mitanni Aryan attested in inscriptions in northern Iraq/Syria/Turkey embedded in other language texts including Kikkuli's Horse training manual (mostly in Hittite, except where he uses "Mitanni Aryan" words in glosses and defines them), and king names in the Hurrian language, which are meaningful when interpreted as Sanskrit.
> its earliest forms to be the common languages which then became some of the modern north Indian languages.
Baseless claim. Sanskrit is not a special ancestor to North Indian languages and there’s nothing that separates North Indian languages from southern ones. Tamil has far more influence on northern Indian languages and other Indian languages including Sanskrit than Sanskrit.
What do you mean by "there's nothing that separates North Indian languages from southern ones"? They're from two distinct language families, aren't they?
Based on linguistics. People have studied the grammar and vocabulary of languages all over the world and classified them into families based on common origins / evolution and characteristics. You can check it out here
The truth is a lot more complex than these binary characterisations. All Indian languages have loanwords (tatsama, tadbhava). One interpretation is that Sanskrit is like bones of the linguistic body while other Prakrit languages provide it with muscle and mass. Sanskrit in it’s abstract form is very hard to use conversationally. Finally Hindi which is the dominant language in the north came from Hindustani which itself has heavy influence of Persian/Urdu.
Linguists have abounded these simplistic trees of ancestry a while back. Truth is all these languages interacted and improved one another. For example it’s likely that Dravidian languages were spoken in the Indus Valley civilization. That would make them the greatest ancestor. Sanskrit was formed much later and was likely influenced by it.
Indo Aryan itself is a racially rooted theory started by Europeans to extract familiar parts of Indian culture and define a collective identity. Reality is far more complex
Sanskrit is one language not many different. It is like saying Bavarian German aka High German is different language from Hamburg German - they are both German. So there is and will be difference between regular speakers with good grammar vs occasional speakers with poor grammar. I run in these issues when I speak basic Sanskrit with Gurukul based students.
The source of Sanskrit and Sanskrit influence is the Saraswat Valley civilisation around 6000 BC. Some recent books have done radio carbon, Sanskrit literature, astronomical charts, climatic events and genomics to validate the time line. The central Asian language influence is migration out of India to Central Europe & Volga referred to as Uttar Kuru.
Please list these books and sources. An 8000 year old timeline is quite a leap over the current consensus which is 3500 years (the Rigveda, whose earliest inscriptions are found way outside the subcontinent all the way over in Syria).
Also what is the Saraswat Valley Civilisation? Are you referring to the Indus Valley Civilisation?
I’m sorry but the Out of India hypothesis is not accepted in the scientific and linguistic consensus in any way. The migration is believed to be in the other direction.
Also, Panini himself distinguished between different forms of Sanskrit as I understand.
Bavarian and other Germans are actually different. 20th century nationalism in Europe merged them into one blob. Same with Italian. In fact many dialects of italian aren’t even mutually intelligible.
Lol at your out of India theory which literally has no basis in any of what you describe
Sanskritist and linguist here. Many discussions of Sanskrit outside the world of linguistics devolve into politics ... the discoveries of the Indians are what they are, just like the discoveries of the Greeks are what they are ... "but what about caste oppression" reminds me a bit of the "math is racist" wackos in the US lately.
wait.. put ref when you are saying " political context to it which cannot be set aside completely.".
What political context, are you talking about. I am not linguist or AI expert. But most of your so facts are of no where related to paper as well as authenticity of the work.
Check the author as well as date of the paper.
This paper has been repeatedly quoted by the far right of India on how one of the elitist ways of doing something is superior and ahead of time. I saw another comment here which linked to a specific instance of usage.
I know the author's intention might be benign. I know the paper dates back to the 80's. But seriously, read through the paper and conclude for yourself if a similar argument can't be made for any of the hundreds of languages in existence today.
Making sweeping false statements without proof or facts. Massive literature (Vedas,Upnishads, yoga, Ayurveda, shavite mediations texts) all were spoken & orally taught till foreign invasions around 1000 AD. The language was part of day to day village culture till India started breaking.
BNF form and Chomsky work was greatly influenced by Panini Grammar Asthadays. It is different matter Chomsky does not acknowledge it while his professors do as to the source of influence on their work.
Tamil derived from Sanskrit as is Malayalam & Kannadiga and countless other Indian languages. So are many words in German, English and central European languages derived from Sanskrit Dhatus(root words). All words in Sanskrit come from this corpus of 2200 root words and new compound words created using these.
Now that is the beauty of Sanskrit. Panini Ashtadaya ought to be read by any serious linguist or CS person trying to built a DSL or a new programming language.
> Tamil derived from Sanskrit as is Malayalam & Kannadiga and countless other Indian languages.
False. Dravidian languages were likely part of Indus Valley civilization. They were the original Indian languages. In fact Tamil doesn’t even have many borrowed words from Sanskrit
Sanskrit was never commonly spoken. Panini himself understands this and created Sanskrit grammar for fast transmission and not easy conversation. It’s not clear if Sanskrit was ever used conversationally. Even today, in Mattur, where everyone uses Sanskrit, it’s not the conversational language. It’s reserved for special occasions and teaching. Decline of Sanskrit has nothing to do with foreign invasions. They never invaded or ruled over south India for long. Hinduism thrived with Shankaracharya, Ramanuja, Bhakthi movement etc in the South. North Indians have no one else but themselves to blame for the loss of their culture.
Have you read Ashtadyayi? It’s a genius piece of work but won’t help you zilch in practice. Also learn the name of the scripture properly before you falsely profess random crap to stroke your ego.
Anybody who has studied Sanskrit & Tamil notices tremendous similarity. Even the sounds and letters 90% overlap. Both Kannadiga & Malayalee agree Sanskrit is the mother language but not missionary funded Tamil political class.
You can’t have it both ways. One side you push the Dravidian supremacist mindset but then claim to be part of the Northern Indus/Saraswati valley civilisation. Indian used to be contiguous land mass, one time all the way to Bali and up to Volga river - king Lalitaditya including Gandhar(Kandhar, AFghanistan.)
I don)t believe in North & South Indian rhetoric - colonial trope popular with Christian missionaries. Not only I have read Ashtaadayi but used it’s principles to build a DSL. Sanskrit was designed for compactness and ease of remembrance, does not rule it out for speaking. I live near Asharams where they speak Sanskrit even today. This Himalayan Ashram is nearly 300 years old.
You keep making false, vague and generalised self serving statements as if you lived and spoken Sanskrit for 100 years. The corpus of Sanskrit literature exposes your “zilch” mindset. So tell me few phonetic sounds which exists in Tamil but not in Sanskrit & ones which exist both in Sanskrit and Tamil ?
That will set the record straight for the audience without you trying to bamboozle us with political rhetoric.
This is so ignorant and willfully racist I’m going to reply once and then stop. First is Kannada. Kannadiga means a person of Kannada culture. Same with Malayalee-Malayalam. No one accepts in any southern languages that Sanskrit is the mother language. This notion died in 20th century when linguistic analysis showed the mutual interaction between languages. Tamil and Sanskrit might seem similar to you the same way German and English are. But just as they didn’t inherit one another neither did Sanskrit or Tamil.
After the decline of Indus Valley and drought in the Saraswati basin the people moved south and westwards. This is archeologically well supported.
Volga is in Russia. Ancient India was only up to Khyber pass. Chanakya made it a point to protect that pass to protect India from foreign invasions and it was never breached until Islamic invasions 1000 years ago.
It’s Ashtadhyayi my dude. Not Ashtaadayi. It’s not even a word. The fact that you don’t realize this glaring error after pointing it out twice tells me everything about your actual knowledge behind these claims.
I’m from an orthodox Brahmin community and yes we do speak Sanskrit. Not just speak but plenty of my relatives have written books and conducted debates in them regularly. Which is also why your borderline childish knowledge seems so obvious to me.
And Christian missionary what? Here we go again with the victim complex and conspiracies. You blame someone else for your own ignorance.
Phonetic sounds are never the basis for identification of languages. Mutual intelligibility and grammar is. Lots of languages sound like one another without having anything in common. All European languages roughly use Greco-Roman phonemes. But they’re far from identical.
There’s no political rhetoric in my replies. It’s you who is making up random unsubstantiated claims and twisting reality when you can’t even spell or correctly write 50% of the words you’re using.
Sanskrit is not the mother of anything. It existed along with Prakrit, Pali and dozens of other languages. They all mixed, bred and propagated through history. Your North Indian supremacist attitude is just a coping mechanism to escape from poverty and backwardness of the north
BTW: I’m not a tamilian. I just used it as an example. And here you are talking about missionary funding and Christianity. It tells a lot about what you actually think. You’ve been fed some Hindutva propaganda and you’re trying to parrot it here.
Interestingly anything Indian mentioned in this forum most of the time sounds chauvinistic to me. Not this comment itself but the point it makes at the end says what I mean. There’s this effort trying to appear distinguished.
Indian right wing is a formidable force. They have a deep sense of entitlement and more than that a deep sense of resentment towards the west. You’ll see artifacts of them coping, gerrymandering and twisting reality to serve ideological purposes. The current government is particularly interested in “pride” more than any modern democracy
We are going through something akin to the KKK era of the South - protecting the culture and all that. How and to what extent this gets settled would have immense significance.
Panini's grammar of Sanskrit is an incredible artifact, all the more so since it was likely composed and transmitted entirely orally at first. It is a completely formalized generative grammar of Sanskrit morphophonemics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C4%81%E1%B9%87ini
Sadly even Panini’s contributions are always presented in s religious context which is such a shame. The man invented Buckus Naur form 2000 years ago and that’s how we honor him
Look up Maheshwara Sutrani. Apparently Panini heard Shivas damaru and discovered Sanskrit morphology. More religious ones claim he was meditating when God appeared and presented it to him.
Most people believe Panini just discovered the amazing properties of Sanskrit. In fact Sanskrit is just any other language except Panini’s grammar which is a rigors and unique formalization of it.
So short summary: This paper from the 1980's, by a researcher then associated with NASA Ames Research Center basically states that the Sanskrit linguistical and grammatical traditions had mechanisms for describing words and their relations (between the 5th century BC, through the 15th century AD), that didn't make it to Western grammatical traditions until the mid 20th century.
These same relations are those that were used in Artificial Intelligence linguistic models, and given that the Paninian grammar could fairly unambiguously represent Sanskrit, it would be possible to map Sanskrit into a programmatic model for natural language processing in computers.
Note that through decades of misintepretation in the popular press, this has become, "Sanskrit is the ideal language for programming in computers, or even "NASA has endorsed Sanskrit as the ideal language for programming computers".
For a fact, this paper had been quoted and superficially extended several times by Sanskrit scholars I have met in the past. Typical arguments include the 'semantics is suitable for knowledge extraction', to 'replacing English as the modicum of computer instruction set' (supported by claims for disambiguity in grammar) [1,2]. There is no evidence to support these ideas. Like 'lewisjoe', I am from the same subcontinent and share the very same opinion. The reasons are more political signaling and intellectual statement delivery than actual science.[3]
A similar claim that I have heard from half baked biologists is that gene constituents ACTG will replace binary encoding in future computing (because ACTG have 4 elements as compared to binary 2, and we are the living proof it works!). While genes were researched in MSR for high density storage (Source: yours truly ex-MSR alumnus working with CS+genetics team), there is no hard evidence a base-4 biological system will inherently perform better than the mathematical base-2. We always had octal and hexadecimal bases. These have their strength and weakness. But from the CPU perspectives, base-2 perfectly encodes HI and LO voltage states and hence the adoption.
I wish such researchers took a bit of efforts to investigate their claim's feasibility and the underlying processing structure before making grand statements about computational roadmaps.
Another language some people believe would make for better human-computer interaction is Lojban. Unfortunately, despite having been around for decades, it hasn't made much progress in this area.
You would need to define natural language to engage with this debate. What you will find is that a definition that makes the dialect of sanskrit refered to in the paper 'natural' will include other languages that have similar lack of ambiguity.
If you find this interesting, you might also like the book Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty by Vikram Chandra. It explores connections between linguistics and computation and touches upon Paninian grammar.
Coming back to the premise of the paper, the grammar of this language is declared to be sufficiently easy to disambiguify such that it's easier for computers to understand. Just to put it in context, this property is actually a part of many other languages including japanese. Pro tip: Most of japanese grammar can be covered with a handful of BNF grammar! Being an indian I know one other language spoken in the south of India that exhibits this property as well - Tamil. Equally ancient as sanskrit but widely spoken language even as of 2021.
Point being, the intention of the paper, though it sounds benign, there is a political context to it which cannot be set aside completely.