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Sanskrit: The Mother of all Languages
May 5, 2014
SANSKRIT is one of the official languages of India, and is popularly known as a classical language of the country. Considered to be the Mother of all Languages, it belongs to the Indic group of language family of Indo-European and its descendents, which are Indo-Iranian and Indo-Aryan.
The meaning of Sanskrit is refined, decorated or produced in perfect form. The language is also known for its clarity and beauty. It is also a language of Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism.
Sanskrit is now attracting the modern world. This is the only language that is used in Holy functions and ceremonies of Hindus, as it has always been regarded as the sacred language of the religion. Sanskrit mantras, when recited in combination with the sound vibration, have a specific effect on the mind and the psyche of the individual.
HISTORY
It is said that Brahma was the creator and introduced Sanskrit language to the Sages of celestial bodies. Therefore, this language is also called Dev Vani, which means the language of Gods. It was during the 18th Century when a similarity between Sanskrit, Latin and Greek was found, which gave the reason to study and discover the relationship of all Indo-European languages.
The earliest form of Sanskrit language was Vedic Sanskrit that came approximately around 1500-200 B.C. This was the period when knowledge was imparted orally through the generations.
LITERATURE
One of the oldest languages known for over thousands of years, Sanskrit literature is the richest literature in the history of humankind. The composition of hymns, poems, puranas during the Vedic period formed sacred scripts of Hindus. The oldest known texts in Sanskrit are the Rigveda, Sama-veda, Yajur-veda and the Atharva-veda. Classical Sanskrit based on the old Vedic speech came up approximately between 500 B.C.-1000 A.D. It was the period after which Panini composed his grammar of Sanskrit. The two great epics of this period were Ramayana and Mahabharata.
NUMBER OF SPEAKERS
Around 49,736 of the population speak the Sanskrit language fluently, according to the 1991 Indian census. Many Buddhist scholars of Japan, China, Thailand use Sanskrit language apart from India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal, some areas of south and Southeast Asia.
WRITING SYSTEM
Through the development of early classical Sanskrit literature, the oral tradition was maintained. Sanskrit was spoken in an oral society and the writing was not introduced to India until after Sanskrit had evolved into the Prakrits.
The regional scripts of the scribe influenced the choice of writing system. Devanagari has been considered as the effective writing system for Sanskrit since the late 19th century. The reason for this could be the European practice of printing Sanskrit texts in this script. Brahmi developed into an array of scripts of the Brahmic family, many of which were used to write Sanskrit. The Kharosthi script was used in the northwest of the subcontinent. The Gupta script that has been derived from Brahmi, became prevalent around the 4th to 8th centuries CE. The Bengali script and the Oriya script were used in Eastern India. In the south, Kannada, Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam and Grantha were the scripts used for Sanskrit.
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Sanskrit - a documentary
Abhishek Leslie - Aug 23, 2016
Sanskrit has been the language of Culture and Science over 3 millinea. When the wester countries are going great strides in the research of Sanskrit , it is almost a forgotten language in India. this documentary is aimed at creating awareness for the rediscovery of Sanskrit in India.
Birth of Sanskrit Language
Learn 3 Stories of Origin of The Sanskrit Alphabet
The Sanskrit Channel - March 3, 2022
This video is a part of a much larger course offered on Google Classroom. To join this course, please register at:
The First Sanskrit Lesson- Mastery of Sound
The Sanskrit Channel - Aug 26, 2019
Let's experience the truth behind claims of Sanskrit being an existentially significant language. In this video, we explore the origin of basic sounds in Sanskrit- specifically Swaras.
REFERENCES
NEWS RELEASES
Ancient grammatical puzzle solved after 2,500 years
December 15, 2022
A grammatical problem which has defeated Sanskrit scholars since the 5th Century BC has finally been solved by former FAMES PhD student. Rishi Rajpopat made the breakthrough by decoding a rule taught by “the father of linguistics” Pāṇini.
The discovery makes it possible to 'derive' any Sanskrit word – to construct millions of grammatically correct words including ‘mantra’ and ‘guru’ – using Pāṇini’s revered ‘language machine’ which is widely considered to be one of the greatest intellectual achievements in history.
Leading Sanskrit experts have described Rajpopat’s discovery as ‘revolutionary’ and it could now mean that Pāṇini’s grammar can be taught to computers for the first time.
While researching his PhD, published today, Dr Rajpopat decoded a 2,500 year old algorithm which makes it possible, for the first time, to accurately use Pāṇini’s ‘language machine’.
Pāṇini’s system – 4,000 rules detailed in his renowned work, the Aṣṭādhyāyī, which is thought to have been written around 500BC – is meant to work like a machine. Feed in the base and suffix of a word and it should turn them into grammatically correct words and sentences through a step-by-step process.
Until now, however, there has been a big problem. Often, two or more of Pāṇini’s rules are simultaneously applicable at the same step leaving scholars to agonise over which one to choose.
Solving so-called 'rule conflicts', which affect millions of Sanskrit words including certain forms of ‘mantra’ and ‘guru’, requires an algorithm. Pāṇini taught a metarule* to help us decide which rule should be applied in the event of ‘rule conflict’ but for the last 2,500 years, scholars have misinterpreted this metarule meaning that they often ended up with a grammatically incorrect result.
In an attempt to fix this issue, many scholars laboriously developed hundreds of other metarules but Dr Rajpopat shows that these are not just incapable of solving the problem at hand – they all produced too many exceptions – but also completely unnecessary. Rajpopat shows that Pāṇini’s ‘language machine’ is ‘self-sufficient’.
Rajpopat said: “Pāṇini had an extraordinary mind and he built a machine unrivalled in human history. He didn’t expect us to add new ideas to his rules. The more we fiddle with Pāṇini's grammar, the more it eludes us.”
Traditionally, scholars have interpreted Pāṇini’s metarule 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.
Rajpopat rejects this, arguing instead that Pāṇini meant that between rules applicable to the left and right sides of a word respectively, Pāṇini wanted us to choose the rule applicable to the right side. Employing this interpretation, Rajpopat found Pāṇini’s language machine produced grammatically correct words with almost no exceptions.
Take ‘mantra’ and ‘guru’ as examples. In the sentence 'devāḥ prasannāḥ mantraiḥ' ('The Gods [devāḥ] are pleased [prasannāḥ] by the mantras [mantraiḥ]') we encounter ‘rule conflict’ when deriving mantraiḥ ‘by the mantras’. The derivation starts with ‘mantra + bhis’. One rule is applicable to left part 'mantra' and the other to right part 'bhis'. We must pick the rule applicable to the right part ‘bhis’, which gives us the correct form ‘mantraiḥ’.
And in the the sentence 'jñānaṁ dīyate guruṇā' ('Knowledge [jñānaṁ] is given [dīyate] by the guru [guruṇā]') we encounter rule conflict when deriving guruṇā 'by the guru'. The derivation starts with ‘guru + ā’. One rule is applicable to left part 'guru' and the other to right part 'ā'. We must pick the rule applicable to the right part ‘ā’, which gives us the correct form ‘guruṇā’.
Eureka moment
Six months before Rajpopat made his discovery, his supervisor at Cambridge, Professor Vincenzo Vergiani, Professor of Sanskrit, gave him some prescient advice: “If the solution is complicated, you are probably wrong.”
Rajpopat said: “I had a eureka moment in Cambridge. After 9 months trying to crack this problem, I was almost ready to quit, I was getting nowhere. So I closed the books for a month and just enjoyed the summer, swimming, cycling, cooking, praying and meditating. Then, begrudgingly I went back to work, and, within minutes, as I turned the pages, these patterns starting emerging, and it all started to make sense. There was a lot more work to do but I’d found the biggest part of the puzzle.”
“Over the next few weeks I was so excited, I couldn’t sleep and would spend hours in the library including in the middle of the night to check what I’d found and solve related problems. That work took another two and half years.”
Significance
Professor Vincenzo Vergiani said: "My student Rishi has cracked it – he has found an extraordinarily elegant solution to a problem which has perplexed scholars for centuries. This discovery will revolutionise the study of Sanskrit at a time when interest in the language is on the rise.”
Sanskrit is an ancient and classical Indo-European language from South Asia. It is the sacred language of Hinduism, but also the medium through which much of India’s greatest science, philosophy, poetry and other secular literature have been communicated for centuries. While only spoken in India by an estimated 25,000 people today, Sanskrit has growing political significance in India, and has influenced many other languages and cultures around the world.
Rajpopat said: “Some of the most ancient wisdom of India has been produced in Sanskrit and we still don’t fully understand what our ancestors achieved. We’ve often been led to believe that we’re not important, that we haven’t brought enough to the table. I hope this discovery will infuse students in India with confidence, pride, and hope that they too can achieve great things.”
A major implication of Dr Rajpopat’s discovery is that now we have the algorithm that runs Pāṇini's grammar, we could potentially teach this grammar to computers.
Rajpopat said: "Computer scientists working on Natural Language Processing gave up on rule-based approaches over 50 years ago.
“So teaching computers how to combine the speaker’s intention with Pāṇini’s rule-based grammar to produce human speech would be a major milestone in the history of human interaction with machines, as well as in India's intellectual history."
Reference
R.A. Rajpopat, ‘In Pāṇini We Trust: Discovering the Algorithm for Rule Conflict Resolution in the Aṣṭādhyāyī’, PhD thesis (University of Cambridge, 2022). DOI: 10.17863/CAM.80099
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