
What is so ‘scientific’ about Sanskrit? - indexerror
http://smritiweb.com/navin/miscellaneous/what-is-so-scientific-about-sanskrit-seriousquestion
======
svat
This article only scratches the surface, I think.

One thing that is worth clarifying IMO: There is nothing inherently
“scientific” about Sanskrit as a language by itself: instead what's remarkable
are

1\. the Sanskrit grammatical tradition, as represented especially by Pāṇini.
The Sanskrit grammarians paid special attention to language, and their careful
study culminated in a grammar by Pāṇini that was centuries ahead of its time,
and is still throwing up new insights. The last several generations of modern
linguists have read their own ideas into Pāṇini: from William Jones at the
start of historical linguistics to de Saussure to Chomsky to Kiparsky. (The
last of whom is an expert in both Sanskrit and modern linguistics.) Panini
occupies a place in Indian thought equivalent to that of Euclid in Greek, and
explicit comparisons have been drawn between the two. (E.g. all students were
expected to master them respectively, these were the sciences that all others
sought to emulate, ...) (I remember reading somewhere something to the effect
that: among achievements of civilizations, the Egyptians have their pyramids
and India has Panini's grammar.)

2\. the cultural fact that, Pāṇini's grammar having been so
exhaustive/complete, it became regarded as the _definition_ of correct
Sanskrit, and culturally for centuries everyone who composes in Sanskrit has
just chosen to stick to this grammar. This "froze" Sanskrit and gives it a
timeless quality: Sanskrit poets composing today use the same language that
would have been comprehensible centuries ago; learning this one language opens
up literature spanning 2500 years. With other languages that evolve naturally,
this is difficult: even Shakespeare's (early) _modern_ English is difficult
for many.

~~~
Florin_Andrei
TLDR: Sanskrit was formalized very early on.

~~~
svat
Well, yes. Thanks. What I was trying to say is that the formalization is
actually _great_ :

\- it is useful to linguists. (Modern linguistics borrows terms like sandhi
and bahuvrihi for example.)

\- it is acceptable to language users. Poets have continued to compose in the
same language, without finding the formalization artificial.

\- it is interesting even as an achievement of the human mind/culture.

A somewhat trivial example, but possibly of interest to the HN audience: the
grammar needs to refer to various sets of sounds (like "nasal consonants",
"short vowels", "aspirated stops" and so on). To compactly encode these sets,
it adopts a curious ordering of the sounds, so that each required set can be
represented as a certain substring of that sequence.

It turns out that this ordering can be shown to be optimal: see e.g.

\- Economy and the Construction of the Śivasūtras by Paul Kiparsky, Stanford
University
[http://www.stanford.edu/~kiparsky/Papers/siva-t.pdf](http://www.stanford.edu/~kiparsky/Papers/siva-t.pdf)

\- A Mathematical Analysis of Pāṇini’s Śiva sūtras, by Wiebke Petersen,
University of Düsseldorf [http://user.phil-fak.uni-
duesseldorf.de/~petersen/paper/pete...](http://user.phil-fak.uni-
duesseldorf.de/~petersen/paper/petersen_jolli_proof.pdf)

~~~
shas3
Thanks for the link to Kiparsky's paper on mAheshvarasutraNi. Starting from
the system of grouping and ordering, sandhi rules became straightforward to
understand. When I first learned the sutras in school, we were presented with
a lot of hand-waving and circular reasoning (sandhi rules- sutra grouping -
sandhi rules) about why they were ordered in that seemingly arbitrary manner.
It is cool that Kiparsky has solved the inverse problem of figuring out
Panini's generative system for the grouping and ordering of syllables!

------
monster_group
I am currently studying Panini's Ashtadhyayi (the authoritative source of
Sanskrit grammar) and I can tell you from first hand experience what is true
and what is not. That Sanskrit is scientific, mathematical, ideal for AI/Comp
Sci is gross exaggeration. Panini's work is truly astounding. It is extremely
concise and dense. He uses some concepts to explain grammar rules that are
normally not used in natural language grammars. For example, he assigns names
to certain concepts and then builds on those concepts to create more and more
complicated rules. There are rules that encompass other rules. There are rules
that prohibit rules declared elsewhere in the book under certain
circumstances. You can obtain a verb form by systematically applying 5-6 rules
successively. If you know how to apply the rules you don't have to remember
verb forms. They can be derived (easier said than done because there are 4000
rules and multiple rules can be applied with plenty exceptions and there are
exceptions to exceptions). Panini was far ahead of his time and his work is
truly amazing but there is nothing scientific/AI about it. He was a genius who
devised a very clever way to succinctly list immensely complicated rules of
Sanskrit grammar. Because Sanskrit grammar relies on very precise rules it is
very amenable to computational analysis. However this does not mean that it is
useful in Comp Sci/ AI as many Sanskrit zealots brag without any proof
whatsoever.

~~~
svat
I know how the Sanskrit/AI thing started (it's alluded to in the linked
article, but not clearly enough).

In 1985, Rick Briggs, a NASA employee and Sanskrit (over)enthusiast, wrote an
article in AI magazine [1] pointing out that for knowledge representation, one
could use the Navya-Nyaya language (which in his article he called "Shastric
Sanskrit"). As this (highly artificial) language (or "dialect of Sanskrit"?)
had been created by the Navya Nyaya school precisely for knowledge
representation (in some sense), this is not very surprising. A good
description of this language is given by Ganeri ([2][3]). I think it's good to
publish such articles to show "related work" across cultures (and centuries).
There are no clear advantages to using this Navya-Nyaya language over some
other formal language though.

In popular culture, the awareness of the existence of this paper morphed from
"a particular formal dialect of Sanskrit devised by logicians for knowledge
representation happens to be good at knowledge representation which we need in
AI" into "Sanskrit is useful for AI" into "Sanskrit is great for computers".

[1]:
[https://www.aaai.org/ojs/index.php/aimagazine/article/view/4...](https://www.aaai.org/ojs/index.php/aimagazine/article/view/466)

[2]:
[http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pollock/sks/papers/Ganeri...](http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pollock/sks/papers/Ganeri\(Matilal%20vol\).pdf)

[3]: [http://www.academia.edu/download/30301777/Logic_Navya-
Nyaya_...](http://www.academia.edu/download/30301777/Logic_Navya-
Nyaya_and_Applications_2008_Ganeri-1.pdf)

~~~
monster_group
Thank you for providing this information. It is amazing how everybody seems to
have an opinion about Sanskrit (not talking about you but the media/government
etc.) without actually having spent any effort to learn or understand it.

------
treehau5
I feel like I have read this exact article before, but instead of Sanskrit it
was about Greek. I know this adds nothing of value to the discussion, but I
thought it was an odd deja-vu. Does anyone perhaps know which article I am
talking about?

~~~
danidiaz
Not about mathematics, but Heidegger subscribed to the dumb notion that
philosophy could only be done in Greek and German:
[https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/37972/what-
is...](https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/37972/what-is-the-
argument-for-heideggers-claim-that-philosophy-can-only-be-done-in-g)

~~~
treehau5
Kind of similar reasoning that Church services can only be done in
Latin/Greek. There is a bit of merit to this from that angle in that when you
go from a more expressive language to a less expressive language, you
inevitably simply cannot translate or express certain concepts.

~~~
umanwizard
What makes a language more or less expressive? Do you have scientific evidence
for your shocking claim that e.g. English is "less expressive" than Latin?

~~~
treehau5
You are right, different doesn't mean more or less expressive. I was merely
going on my experience being a Greek and English speaker, and a Latin student
-- there are concepts that simply do not translate over to English, and I have
not encountered this hurdle when translating from English to Greek.

------
mrcactu5
I took Sanskrit as an undergrad at Princeton as an alternative to Latin. It
was hard to absorb all the declensions, to be honest, and still connect to the
text. The assumption is that you were eventually going to read Bhagava Gita or
some other religious text.

Also, the Sanskrit course got very political, for reasons I could not relate
to at all, involving the history of India. The textbook remains on my
bookshelf, gathering dust.

~~~
devnonymous
This is a problem with a lot of Indian studies[1]. The subjects are so
intertwined with religion, culture, mythology (to say nothing about the biases
and opinions of the people who would be teaching you) that while on one hand
it helps in establishing context, on the other hand it distracts from the
subject matter which honestly are deeply interesting independent of their
cultural baggage.

[1] In case you're curious, what exactly I mean by Indian studies, some
examples are all form of classical Indian music (and that's quite a few ..if
you are to consider learning specific musical instruments by themselves as a
subject, besides music theory), classical Indian dance forms, Yoga, Ayurveda
...etc

------
freshhawk
The link "which claims that one of the great attributes of Sanskrit is that
the same sentence can have two or more completely different meanings" explains
clearly how this happens. Names in Sanskrit are simply descriptive attributes.
Things traditionally have many names (which are simply descriptions of
different aspects) but that seems unimportant in this context.

I don't see how that interferes with it being used as a programming language,
although it doesn't seem particularly useful for the AI problems it was
proposed for. There is also no need to carry over the tradition of referring
to the same thing with different descriptions in a programming context.

It seems kinda neat that every name is necessarily descriptive as well.

Am I missing something, perhaps the ambiguity goes deeper than that?

~~~
Florin_Andrei
It's a language with a long cultured tradition, that was formalized very early
on. Of course that early formalization would have an impact, that's what you
would expect.

The many layers of meanings is again what you would expect to emerge after a
long history of entangling various fields of knowledge, such as philosophy,
history, theology, etc, in a dense web with language at its core seen as a
primary tool of exploration in these fields (their metaphysics postulated that
words have "power" in and of themselves, so language automatically acquired
very high status).

Some of these developments are also seen in Europe historically, but not to
the same extent. Probably because there was no single unifying language there
to play that role (Latin did play that role, but too briefly, and there was no
continuity on that level between the ancient Greek tradition and the
latinizing Middle Ages - while the whole eastern half of that cultural
ecosystem skewed towards a Slavic lingua franca, and even then mostly for
religious purposes).

~~~
ganfortran
But computers hate ambiguity.

~~~
freshhawk
But as I understand it the ambiguity is not in the grammar, but only related
to the high prevalence of homonyms.

------
m23khan
Speaking about Urdu (among different languages, derived from Sanskrit):

It is one of the languages in which every language, word can be copied into
and pronounced to a surprising accuracy. For example, this very post can be
written using Urdu syntax and still be pronounced closely to as it would sound
in English!

While Sanskrit (and to an extent Hindi) may have some unique properties, I
find the syntax (script/alphabet) extremely daunting to understand (for a non
Hindi/Sanskrit speaker).

But ultimately, research should continue I guess to see if there is any
Sanskrit-derived benefits for the mankind.

~~~
umanwizard
I'm lost, what does pronunciation have to do with syntax?

------
MockObject
I would think if any human-speakable language were promoted for AI uses, it
would be the machine parsable language based on formal logic, Lojban. I've
thought for a while that this is the perfect halfway-point for human-computer
communication.

[https://mw.lojban.org/papri/Lojban](https://mw.lojban.org/papri/Lojban)

------
devnonymous
We need more articles like this. The more vocal chest thumping 'patriots' do a
great disservice to the rich fascinating history of India by mixing impressive
facts with laughable fiction.

------
ganfortran
What makes a language scientific? Apparently, modern science is born in the
land where people don't bother to persuade others that their language, by
nature, is more scientific than the rest.

The push of such argument is inherently nationalistic than 'scientific',
ironically.

------
j0e1
Reason and truth are so refreshing to the ear! I commend you for being
objective on this topic.

------
agumonkey
the recursive infinite nature of it ?

~~~
umanwizard
What does that mean, exactly?

~~~
agumonkey
Not much, but old languages seem ad-hoc in nature, see measurement units
before the metric system, or counting subsystems (4x20 in French for
instance). It was a discontinuous aggregate of pragmatic descriptions. Indians
very early into fully regular and deep nesting (based on the few thin bits
I've read).

------
maverick_iceman
Panini's work is considered to be the precursor of Backus-Naur form.[1]

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backus%E2%80%93Naur_form#Histo...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backus%E2%80%93Naur_form#History)

~~~
dedalus
In fact it was generative. In that, you could not speak the language for 1000
years and still generate all valid strings that can be thought of as members
of the language

~~~
maverick_iceman
Why isn't that trivially true of all languages? You can generate infinitely
many valid strings of arbitrary length in any grammar. How's that special
about Sanskrit?

------
X86BSD
I showed this to my wife. She called the article and the author a troll. I'm
looking forward to her explanation why.

------
brilliantcode
Interesting stuff. The Korean language is considered one of the most
scientific language on the planet. I'm puzzled why that NASA guy would push
Sanskrit to be an actual application language. In my opinion, an HN'er should
be able to read and write Korean in about an hour. I don't know if that's true
for Sanskrit.

Taking a look at Sanskrit, it looks very cool. I think it's aesthetically
better looking than Korean alphabet.

[http://www.omniglot.com/images/writing/sanskrit_cons.gif](http://www.omniglot.com/images/writing/sanskrit_cons.gif)

~~~
Nadya
I challenge that most could learn to read and write Korean within 15 minutes
[0]. At most, stumbling over some of the vowels. It really is a marvelously
simple language. Of course - reading it at speed will still take more practice
but I feel one could become quite proficient at reading (without any
comprehension of what they are reading) within a few weeks of practice.

[0]
[http://www.ryanestrada.com/learntoreadkoreanin15minutes/](http://www.ryanestrada.com/learntoreadkoreanin15minutes/)

~~~
mrout
>one could become quite proficient at reading (without any comprehension of
what they are reading)

If you can't comprehend what you're reading, you're not reading. Learning the
Korean alphabet is _not_ learning Korean.

~~~
Nadya
I disagree entirely. You can read without comprehension - hell I can read my
native language without comprehending what I'm actually reading. I'm still
_reading_ when I do so. What else would you call it when reading a heavily
technical document you don't fully understand? You may not comprehend what the
words as a whole mean but you're still reading.

FWIW, only one dictionary definition I can find includes "comprehend" in the
definition and it still falls under other definitions such as "speaking aloud
written or printed material to other people".

I never claimed it was. My post was very specifically about learning to read
and write Hangul.

~~~
mrout
Korean and Hangul are different. If you know the Latin alphabet that doesn't
mean you know how to read English. It means you know how to read the Latin
alphabet.

