Panini’s Ashtadhyayi & Grammar’s Greatest Puzzle

• 21 Jan 2023

Why in News?

Recently, a Cambridge scholar Dr Rishi Rajpopat’s has claimed to have solved Sanskrit’s biggest puzzle—a grammar problem found in the ‘Ashtadhyayi’.

What is Ashtadhyayi?

• Written more than 2,000 years ago, Ashtadhyayi or ‘Eight Chapters', is an ancient text written by the scholar Panini towards the end of the 4^th century BC.
• It is a linguistic text that set the standard for how Sanskrit was meant to be written and spoken.
• It delves deep into the language’s phonetics, syntax and grammar, and also offers a ‘language machine’, where one can feed in the root and suffix of any Sanskrit word, and get grammatically correct words and sentences in return.
• The Ashtadhyayi laid down more than 4,000 grammatical rules.
  • Later Indian grammars such as the Mahabhasya of Patanjali (2^nd century BC) and the Kasika Vritti of Jayaditya and Vamana (7^th century AD), were mostly commentaries on Panini.

What was the Puzzle?

• Confusing Rules:
  • In Ashtadhyayi, there were two or more of the rules of Grammar that could apply at the same time, causing confusion.
  • To resolve this, Panini had provided a ‘meta-rule’ (a rule governing rules), which had historically been interpreted as- In the event of a conflict between two rules of equal strength, the rule that comes later in the serial order of the ‘Ashtadhyayi’ wins.
  • However, it kept producing exceptions, for which scholars had to keep writing additional rules. This is where Dr Rishi Rajpopat’s discovery came through.
• Solution:
  • The Scholar took a simpler approach, arguing that the meta-rule has been wrongly interpreted throughout history; what Panini actually meant was that for rules applying to the left and right sides of a word, readers should use the right-hand side rule.
  • Using this logic, Dr Rajpopat found that the ‘Ashtadhyayi’ could finally become an accurate ‘language machine’, producing grammatically sound words and sentences almost every time.

• Significance:
  • The discovery now makes it possible to construct millions of Sanskrit words using Panini’s system—and since his grammar rules were exact and formulaic, they can act as a Sanskrit language algorithm that can be taught to computers.

Who was Panini, the Father of Linguistics?

• Panini probably lived in the 4^th century BC, the age of the conquests of Alexander and the founding of the Mauryan Empire, even though he has also been dated to the 6^th century BC, the age of The Buddha and Mahavira.
• He likely lived in Salatura (Gandhara), which today would lie in north-west Pakistan, and was probably associated with the great university at Taksasila, which also produced Kautilya and Charaka, the ancient Indian masters of statecraft and medicine respectively.
• By the time Panini’s great grammar, the ‘Ashtadhyayi’ was composed, Sanskrit had virtually reached its classical form — and developed little thereafter.
• Panini’s grammar, which built on the work of many earlier grammarians, effectively stabilised the Sanskrit language.
• The earlier works had recognised the root as the basic element of a word, and had classified some 2,000 monosyllabic roots which, with the addition of prefixes, suffixes and inflexions, were thought to provide all the words of the language.

Source: IE