Meet Rajpopat, 27-year-old Man Who Solved a 2,500-year-old Language Problem

Cursory: Mr. Rajpopat, a 27-year-old Ph.D. student, has decoded a rule taught by Panini, a master of the ancient Sanskrit language who lived around 2,500 years ago.

Sanskrit, although not widely spoken, is the sacred language of Hinduism and has been used in India’s science, philosophy, poetry, and other secular literature over the centuries.

Pāṇini, a grammarian who invented a grammar known as the Astadhyayi, relied on a system that functioned like an algorithm to turn the base and suffix of a word into grammatically correct words and sentences.

However, two or more of Panini’s rules often apply simultaneously, resulting in conflicts. Panini taught a “metarule”, which is traditionally interpreted by scholars as meaning “in the event of a conflict between two rules of equal strength, the rule that comes later in the grammar’s serial order wins”. However, this often led to grammatically incorrect results.

Mr. Rajpopat, the Ph.D. Student, rejected the traditional interpretation of the metarule. Instead, he argued that Panini meant that between rules applicable to the left and right sides of a word respectively, Panini wanted us to choose the rule applicable to the right side.

Employing this interpretation, he found that Panini’s “language machine” produced grammatically correct words with almost no exceptions.

“Then, begrudgingly I went back to work, and, within minutes, as I turned the pages, these patterns started emerging, and it all started to make sense.

“I would spend hours in the library including in the middle of the night, but still needed to work for another two-and-a-half years on the problem. A page from an 18th Century copy of a Panini Sanskrit text.

“A Sanskrit grammatical problem that has perplexed scholars since the 5th Century BC has been solved by a University of Cambridge Ph.D. student.”

Rishi Rajpopat, 27, decoded a rule taught by Panini, a master of the ancient Sanskrit language who lived around 2,500 years ago. Sanskrit is only spoken in India by an estimated 25,000 people out of a population of more than one billion, the university said.

Mr. Rajpopat said he had a sudden breakthrough in Cambridge after spending nine months “getting nowhere”.

“I closed the books for a month and just enjoyed the summer – swimming, cycling, cooking, praying, and meditating,” he said.

“I hope this discovery will infuse students in India with confidence, pride, and hope that they too can achieve great things,” said Mr Rajpopat, from India. His supervisor at Cambridge, professor of Sanskrit Vincenzo Vergiani, said:

“He has found an extraordinarily elegant solution to a problem which has perplexed scholars for centuries.”This discovery will revolutionize the study of Sanskrit at a time when interest in the language is on the rise.”

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