Cambridge Student Solves 2,500-Year-Old Sanskrit Problem - Slashdot
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Cambridge Student Solves 2,500-Year-Old Sanskrit Problem
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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 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 the Panini's "language machine" produced grammatically correct words with almost no exceptions. 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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I wonder how this will affect our understanding of the Vedas... regardless, it's fucking awesome.
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You do realize college education correlates with voting Democrat, right?
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It certainly can't compare to your McDonald's certification for deep fryer operation.
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That one has real-world practical use.
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More money has been made at the fry station than will ever be made with a gender studies degree.
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Diploma mills; enough said.
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I'll check that out when I'm not logged-in from my Moto Z2 with the busted speaker (a feature, not a bug). In the meantime, I hear this [youtube.com] is good, though I haven't taken the time to watch it yet.
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I'd bet AI had already solved it.:-)
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It would almost definitely tell you that it has, and would likely provide you with a very convincingly confident explanation of how it surmounted such an arduous task. But also, given the history of AI chatbot accuracy, the solution would likely be full of holes and inaccuracies. So no, sorry, AI didn't solve it, and probably still can't, and won't for the foreseeable future. If on some off chance it did solve it, it wouldn't be able to tell you how, and the outcome likely wouldn't be reproducible. AI is st
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by NFN_NLN ( 633283 ) on Thursday December 15, 2022 @11:14PM (#63134442)
Your response actually sounds like it came from a chatbot.
Interpret that as you will.
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If you think that's funny, just wait a few years. The internet can be a scary place, my boy, and if you don't already have a well built list of trusted information sources, I suggest you'd best not delay and get on that sooner than later. ChatGPT and it's kin are about to fill this place with fuckloads of nonsense -- not because that's what they were built for, but because humans are limit-testing assholes by nature, so of course some of us will use this tool for evil just to see if we can (and to gauge how
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All right my man, to prove you're not a bot, please select the squares in this grid which contain sarcasm...
Seriously though, hasn't thought about the fake news and product reviews thing. It is going to get a whole lot harder to figure out what is real.
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AI is obviously much more than a toy, and routinely used for all sorts of applications such as imagery analysis, but general purpose AI is some way from being a reality yet.
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It belongs to the Indo-European family of languages, so it has words similar to Latin and English too.
But it has six tenses: Three past tenses: recent past, distant past, ancient past. One present tense. Two future tenses.
It has three numbers, singular, plural and dual.
It has two kinds of verbs: action for the benefit of oneself, action not exclusively for the benefit of oneself.
Three genders: male, female and neuter.
Total of 108 possible suffixes and case endings.
On top of this the prepositions are also suffixes. From Delhi, or by Krishna etc are added as suffixes to the nouns. And the nouns and verbs should have matching cases. There are eight enumerated cases called "differences" (vibhakti)
On top of this, verbs (actions) can be made into nouns, sort of like gerunds. But these verbs too should accept all the case endings and suffixes.
It is no way possible for anyone to memorize all the 864 possible combinations. It is always based on rules.
Further there are rules on how words run together. Stuff like short vowel ending word followed by long vowel beginning word, it will be made long. Or a y sound will be added or a v sound will be added.
Impossible.
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One of the more extreme forms of punishment I imposed on myself in High School was to take Latin for 3 years. If you look at a Latin Textbook, chances are the last 3rd or 4th of it is devoted to just showing the endings of various forms of words. 5 declensions of nouns, 4 conjugations of verbs, not to mention various pronouns.
Does Sanskrit have different declension? So you have to know which declension a noun is in, besides knowing it's gender (masculine, feminine, or neuter). Admittedly, the 4th and 5
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Regarding your last part, Sanskrit doesn't have a lack of nouns, but it's grammar specifies how to form a noun via rules that, unlike German, don't give long words, but relay nature of the thing described by nouns. Loan words are a different category in Sanskrit.
So for example, you can use different nouns for describing same object, like you can describe Jesus as "a loving man" and "a compassionate man" both. It makes a sentence succinct and poetic, understandable since Sanskrit is a vocal language and its
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For the most part English did not "steal words" from Latin. It is descended in part from Latin, via French, via the Normal Conquest. You could say without grossly oversimplifying that English is roughly 40% derived from Latin and 60% derived from proto-Germanic.
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Imagine being a master of Sanskrit AND having a sandwich named after you. What a guy.
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Many people could care less about gramma and don't even know the difference between there and they're.
Or couldn't they care less? Honestly I've heard it wrong so many times I'm not even sure my understanding of the phrase is right anymore.
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I could care less but it would take too much effort.
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As if I could care less.
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3,6,9 again.
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Thank you VERY much for that information! I guess I'll just pass on Sanskrit and return to my Ancient Greek studies. Or maybe get around to those cuneiform courses.
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This is actually sounding a great deal like Latin.
"But it has six tenses: Three past tenses: recent past, distant past, ancient past. One present tense. Two future tenses."
Latin has the same six tenses: past, perfect, pluperfect, present, future, future perfect.
"Three genders: male, female and neuter."
Latin, ditto.
"On top of this the prepositions are also suffixes"
Latin does this.
"On top of this, verbs (actions) can be made into nouns, sort of like gerunds. But these verbs too should accept all the case end
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I don't know Latin. But in the Life of Brian movie, the Roman Centurian who catches Brian trying to write "Romans , Go Home!" on the wall, And corrects his grammar. One of them is "For the benefit of oneself... ". So it could be an vestigial declension. Even in Sanskrit the "for the benefit of" (aathmanepati = self, parasmaipati = not-self) differences are gone in usage, but the differences in cases exist. One just has to know this word for cook is self and that word for cook is not-self. Like knowing whic
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I watched the clip again. It mentions "motion towards" not "for the benefit of oneself". Its possible I confused the "motion towards" with "benefit of action towards/away from". The latter is Sanskrit. The former is some Latin declension.
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As a programmer, which clearly Panini was, I can imagine him watching on, saying,
"Yes, yes, of course that is what I intended. How clever of you to point out what I intended, not what I did. Are there any other of my apparently broken rules you fixed that I can take credit for? Not that they were broken, I was just waiting for someone clever enough to come along and know what I was thinking...."
I can't recall how many times a smartarse novice discovered one of my "mistakes" I had "carefully hidden" for them to find... Of course I always intended it that way... That's why I did things the wrong way, just waiting to see who was smart enough to see through my carefully created ruse that only looked like I hadn't figured out the whole problem... On purpose of course....
At some point, this kid who figured out the problem is going to realise the truth and say, "When I left you I was but the learner, but now I am the master." because if all the scholars before him didn't understand it, it's a relatively safe bet Panini didn't either.
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TL;DR version - Panini said it is a feature not a bug
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Maybe he was having a bad day and too tired to make his statement unambiguous.
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Yep, when we interpret things from thousands of years ago, NOW we have things that are TOTALLY RELEVANT to today.
What a time to be alive.
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Buddhism in Thailand is a religion built on top of a philosophy.
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Regardless of that Panini was a Hindu.
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That is so ignorant you must be American.
It's not Buddhism and Buddhism certainly is a religion. It is more philosophy dense than most religions and there is no god but it does have beliefs in supernatural forces influencing reality so therefore it is a religion. It has plenty of the silly dogma and ceremony every religion has as well. There is the universal afterlife explanation which I'd guess should be a top requirement.If your definition of religion requires god or gods then you've got to get a better d
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Call it a philosophy, not a religion, and suddenly it does not enjoy any more constitutional protection than a sports jersey or investing in index funds. Supreme court is in a trajectory to create very special privilege for Religious beliefs and also to claim only Christianity is religion and relegate all other religions as "philosophies".
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Ok smooth brain. Maybe it would surprise you some people think the study of human history is worth persuing. Did you know that people study languages? And maybe solving a 2,500 year old problem is a BIT notable in its own right. Friggin hell.
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Language literally shapes our thinking. If we want to think better, understanding how language works is fundamental. Understanding language is impossible for all Indian and European languages without understanding Sanskrit, because it has played such a fundamental role in shaping them.
And to add to all of that, you finish with the statement "what a time to be alive", implying the past is a relevant comparator to the present. Presumably there's some sort of distinction in your mind, but I doubt an honest def
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From the description in the summary, it seems weird to think someone would have interpeted the grammar rules as being listed in increasing priority. Its also strange no one connected the rate of incorrect grammar results with the percentage the rule for the right side happened to be later in the grammar list.
Its like someone made a boneheaded interpretation of this metarule early on and I guess no one seriously questioned that interpretation and how clumsy it was for over a millennia. Wow.-
To be fair there are maybe a handful of people who truly study Sanskrit at a technical level. Most properly just learn it for their research into other things and the old rule worked "well enough" that they didn't really care. Kind of like how English teachers yell at students to use proper grammar when the students themselves don't care.
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I'm wondering if the written language had any influence on this. There is no particular reason to see right as following left (or 'after') unless you write it from left to right. According to most sources the language was oral at Panini's time, and it became written in the left to right scripts of India centuries later.
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"in the event of a conflict between two rules of equal strength, the rule that comes later in the grammar's serial order wins."
So, basically, Sanskrit was CSS?-
The reverse: CSS is Sanskrit, basically -- oh wait, no, CSS came later, so.
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"Hey Panini, make me a sammich!"
In this example, the part of the sentence after the comma would be the active part, while the part before it would identify the actor.
This would, of course, solve the ambiguity about whether Panini was the servant or the type of sammich.
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Makes me wonder in 1000 years once all the books are burned and just the data from google serves survived if there will be arguments if its spelled "sammich" or "sandwich". God just the thought of trying to interpret the past 300 years from wikihow alone gives me chills.
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"I never make exceptions. An exception disproves the rule." - Sherlock Holmes
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Try to find a natural language with no irregular grammar. English is one of the worst, but every language has something that doesn't follow the rules.
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.. ChatGPT will be updated with this new rule shortly. So it can begin spewing bullshit in Sanskrit.
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