ASHTADHYAYI 

1. Context

2. Panini

• Panini, the "father of linguistics" probably lived in the 4th 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 6th century BC, the age of The Buddha and Mahavira.
• He likely lived in Salatura (Gandhara), which today would lie in northwest 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" or "Eight Chapter" was composed, Sanskrit had virtually reached its classical form and developed little thereafter, except in its vocabulary the Indologist A L Basham wrote in his 1954 textbook, "The Wonder That Was India".

 

2.1 Panini's grammar

• 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.

• Later Indian grammars such as the Mahabhasya of Patanjali (2nd century BC) and the Kasika Vritti of Jayaditya and Vamana (7th Century AD) were mostly commentaries on Panini.
• Though its fame is much restricted by its specialized nature, there is no doubt that Panini's grammar is one of the greatest intellectual achievements of any ancient civilization and the most detailed and scientific grammar composed before the 19th century in any part of the world.

3. The Problem

• Written more than 2, 000 years ago, the Ashtadhyayi 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 you can feed in the root and suffix of any Sanskrit word and get grammatically correct words and sentences in return.
• To ensure this machine was accurate, Panini wrote a set of 4, 000 rules dictating its logic.
• But as scholars studied it, they found that two or more of the rules could apply at the same time, confusing.

• However, following this interpretation did not solve the machine's problem.
• It kept producing exceptions, for which scholars had to keep writing additional rules. This is where Dr Rishi Rajpopat's discovery came through.

3.1 Lost in translation

• In his thesis titled "Panini We Trust", Dr Rajpopat took a simpler approach, arguing that the meta-rule has been wrongly interpreted throughout history; what Panini meant, was that rules apply to the left and right sides of a word, readers should use the right-hand side rule.
• Using this logic, he found that the Ashtadhyayi could finally become an accurate "language machine", producing grammatically sound words and sentences almost every time.

4. The Way Forward

For Prelims & Mains