Rishi Rajpopat, a 27-year-old student at Cambridge University has solved a grammar puzzle deriving from the texts written by the great Sanskrit scholar and the “father of linguistics” Panini which has perplexed scholars for centuries.
The Indian PhD scholar at the faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern studies at St. John’s College has decoded a rule in Panini’s text Ashtadhyayi.
Panini’s text Ashtadhyayi, which consists of a set of rules for deriving or forming new words from root words, frequently contains conflicting rules for creating new words, leaving many scholars perplexed about which rules to apply.
Many scholars were interested in resolving such a puzzle in this linguistic algorithm of a book. Panini himself wrote a meta-rule to resolve rule conflicts. According to Panini’s meta-rule (as interpreted by scholars over the years), In the occurrence of a conflict between two rules of equal strength, the rule that comes later in the grammar’s serial order is applicable.
Rishi Rajpopat’s rebuttal to scholars over 2,500 years
Rejecting the traditional interpretation of the metarule, Rishi Rajpopat in his dissertation argued that Panini meant that between rules applicable to the left and right sides of a word respectively, Panini wanted the reader to choose the rule applicable to the right side.
For example, there is a rule conflict when attempting to form the word guruṇā, which means ‘by the guru’ and is a known word, in the sentence jna dyate guru — knowledge (jna) is given (dyate) by the guru (guru).
The word is made up of the roots guru + ā. Following Paini’s rules for creating the word that will mean “by the guru,” two rules become applicable: one to the word guru and one to ā. This is solved by selecting the rule that applies to the word on the right, which results in the correct new form guruṇā.
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