
Bhūribhirbhāribhirbhīrābhūbhārairabhirebhire - KhoomeiK
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shishupala_Vadha#Linguistic_ingenuity
======
svat
I wrote[1] this Wikipedia article; nice to see it quoted in the wild! Happy to
answer questions if any.

One thing I'd like to point out is that far from an extinct form, there are
Sanskrit poets even today who can compose verses subject to such constraints,
and at least two of them[2] even do it “live” on stage—compose with any of the
classical constraints, on any given topic!—without pen and paper, as part of a
performance[3] interleaved with many other interruptions.

Edit: About the verse in the title, just now found a Facebook post[4] that
points out it's part of at least 10 such two-consonant verses in that chapter
(which also has verses subject to various other constraints).

\---

[1]: I was not the original creator
([https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Shishupala_Vadha&...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Shishupala_Vadha&oldid=148226543)),
but added most of the content
([https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Shishupala_Vadha&...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Shishupala_Vadha&type=revision&diff=368520655&oldid=247820939)):
90% according to the “Who Wrote That” extension.

[2]: Shatavadhani Ganesh
[https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Shatavadhani_Gane...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Shatavadhani_Ganesh&oldid=944391300)
and Shankar Rajaraman

[3]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Avadhanam&oldid=9...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Avadhanam&oldid=957164092)
– excerpts from a recording of such a performance are at
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3GnorRNjXE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3GnorRNjXE)
though it's best experienced live!

[4]:
[https://www.facebook.com/sanskritsense/posts/438163406786809](https://www.facebook.com/sanskritsense/posts/438163406786809)

~~~
hi41
Thank you for your contributions to wikipedia.

Are you aware of free and open source recording of shlokas that a beginner can
hear and learn to recite?

~~~
svat
Sorry, I'm not sure if I understood your question correctly. If you just mean
recordings of _any_ shlokas, then you can just type the name of your favourite
one into, say, YouTube and find thousands of hours of listening material. Is
that all you meant? For example, I listened to the entire Ramayana recited
wonderfully clearly (at
[https://pravachanam.com/pravachanambrowselist2/296/37/230](https://pravachanam.com/pravachanambrowselist2/296/37/230)
but you can also find that recording elsewhere now). If you meant specifically
a recording of such chitra-kāvya verses, see the other answer you got. Or if
your question was specifically about licensing (not sure if that's what you
meant by open source), search instead on archive.org; you'll still find lots
of results.

~~~
hi41
I want to learn the shlokas from a priest verse by verse. Since all scriptures
are out of copy right, it will be great if the priests who know how to utter
the words correctly record it, people who don't access to priest are free to
learn it. For example, M. S. Subbalaksmi's Vishnu Sahasranamam is very fast
and Brahma is uttered as Bramha or Bramma sometimes. I am not trying to
critique her work, I think it is great. It's just that it is very fast for a
new student to grasp; a verse by verse reading from a priest would be very
useful. Thank you for the resource you suggested, I will take a look.

~~~
svat
Ah I see. About whether “Brahma” is pronounced as written or as “Bramha”,
there is regional variation and difference of opinion even among the best
scholars; recommended is to find a tradition and follow it. Overall M. S.
Subbulakshmi's rendering may not be perfect but it's better than most, and if
you can match it, it would be great. You can slow the playback if it's too
fast; just tried it and at something like 0.7x speed it's still sounds fine
while being slow enough. Anyway, you can look for recordings by people trained
in Vedic recitation (not exactly same as priest…), like the Challakere
brothers. Also, you may benefit from an actual class with feedback from
teacher(s), etc; and Vyoma Labs (sanskritfromhome.in) have many "Learn to
chant…" courses which are (incredibly!) free. Good luck!

------
quickthrower2
That’s it, next scrum meeting I’m saying mahakavyas instead of epic.

~~~
pritambaral
'Maha kavya' simply means 'Great poem' or 'Large poem' or ... 'Epic poem',
where 'kavya' means 'poem'.

So, for your intended use case, I'd suggest saying 'maha' instead of
'mahakavya' since that is closer in semantics to your intention.

~~~
sa1
maha is just an adjective, epic is both an adjective and a noun. That usage is
correct.

~~~
pritambaral
Y̶e̶s̶,̶ ̶b̶u̶t̶ ̶w̶h̶e̶n̶ ̶p̶e̶o̶p̶l̶e̶ ̶e̶x̶c̶l̶a̶i̶m̶ ̶'̶E̶p̶i̶c̶!̶'̶ ̶—̶
̶w̶h̶i̶c̶h̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶u̶s̶a̶g̶e̶ ̶I̶'̶d̶ ̶w̶a̶g̶e̶r̶ ̶m̶y̶ ̶p̶a̶r̶e̶n̶t̶
̶w̶a̶s̶ ̶r̶e̶f̶e̶r̶r̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶—̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶y̶'̶r̶e̶ ̶u̶s̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶
̶a̶d̶j̶e̶c̶t̶i̶v̶e̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶m̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶n̶o̶t̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶n̶o̶u̶n̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶m̶;̶
̶i̶.̶e̶.̶,̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶d̶e̶s̶c̶r̶i̶b̶e̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶m̶a̶g̶n̶i̶t̶u̶d̶e̶ ̶o̶f̶
̶a̶w̶e̶s̶o̶m̶e̶n̶e̶s̶s̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶w̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶y̶'̶v̶e̶ ̶j̶u̶s̶t̶
̶w̶i̶t̶n̶e̶s̶s̶e̶d̶,̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶n̶o̶t̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶c̶a̶l̶l̶ ̶i̶t̶ ̶a̶ ̶'̶g̶r̶e̶a̶t̶
̶p̶o̶e̶m̶'̶,̶ ̶o̶r̶ ̶a̶n̶y̶ ̶p̶o̶e̶m̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶a̶n̶y̶ ̶s̶i̶z̶e̶,̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶
̶t̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶m̶a̶t̶t̶e̶r̶.̶

EDIT: Nvm, I was unfamiliar with the Scrum term.

~~~
ThePadawan
An "epic" (noun) is a Scrum term for a collection of stories.

I'd say that was the intended usage.

------
austinl
This is the closest thing I've seen to Borges' fictional language described in
_Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius_. The language has no nouns, so words are made of
up sets of adjectives.

 _" moon" becomes "round airy-light on dark" or "pale-orange-of-the-sky"._

Because of this structure, it was possible to create poems in the language
that consisted of a single long word.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tl%C3%B6n,_Uqbar,_Orbis_Tertiu...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tl%C3%B6n,_Uqbar,_Orbis_Tertius)

------
yebyen
I'm struck with a sense that this poem with a linguistic constraint is a
mirror for my life at $dayJob, with some embellishment perhaps...

"We want you to write a poem in an obsolete/mostly dead language. And oh, you
may only have two consonants per stanza, no more."

Vs.

"Write and maintain web-based applications in 2020 but do not stray outside of
the list of approved languages (Ruby and PL/SQL), no modern advancements such
as containers or CI/CD are supported, also, remote debuggers are right out."

It was a better analogy in my head, before I wrote it down.

~~~
majewsky
The problem with this analogy: What you describe was an ordinary job maybe
15-20 years ago. If the analogy held, people would have spoken like this poem
in daily life at some point.

~~~
asveikau
They did. Much closer to it anyway. The difference is it was many more than 15
or 20 years.

~~~
svat
I think you may be underrating the mastery required to write verses like this.
Sure, Sanskrit was (and still is!) spoken as a language. But just because you
can speak in Sanskrit does not mean you can come up with constrained verses
like this; it requires a lot of skill. (Just as, to use the analogy above,
just because you can program in C does not mean you can write a winning IOCCC
entry.) The difference between "not speaking Sanskrit" and "speaking idiomatic
Sanskrit" is IMO smaller the difference between "speaking idiomatic Sanskrit"
and "speaking like this poem in daily life" — the former is “just” a matter of
learning a language.

~~~
asveikau
No need to compare to programming. I speak English as a native language but
I'm not great at writing poetry. There are poets who will vastly outperform me
at the task.

But I speak pretty similarly to the poetry, gramatically, lexically,
phonetically, and in a few hundred or thousand years' time nobody will
comprehend those written works the same way I do, just as many Shakespearian
puns and jokes don't work well with current accents even though we are all
speaking "Modern English".

Also, tangentially, I don't know Sanskrit or the modern languages of South
Asia at all. However, given what I know about linguistics and other old
languages I can _guarantee_ you that no modern speaker of Sanksrit understands
it in exactly the same way as the dead authors of those old written works.

~~~
svat
I think we're just using different definitions of “closer” or “similar” to
“people would have spoken like this poem in daily life”. :-) To me,
“grammatically, lexically, phonetically” is the trivial part. Learning English
is achievable, and many do it. But no one in the course of their daily speech
accidentally starts speaking in palindromes, or single-consonant verses — the
distance to it seems much greater. I do see it's just a matter of definitions
though, something like measuring lexicographic distance of strings versus
measuring K-L divergence of the probability distributions on strings. My point
is that it would be staggering if at any point in history people spoke such a
verse in daily life, and your point is that they were speaking the same
language, so it's “closer” in some sense. Both are valid perspectives, I
guess.

Anyway, about the tangent: both modern speakers and the dead author of this
old written work are from centuries after something like Sanskrit was the
spoken language of the street, and both learned Sanskrit by reading many of
the same authors and aspiring to adhere to the same (very comprehensive)
grammar, so the difference is not as much as one may think: I cannot enumerate
any point of difference as far as the language goes (grammatically,
phonetically, etc), except for things like quotations from later centuries
being more familiar to later authors. This is like: Gauss was writing in Latin
about three centuries after Copernicus (say), but both of them understood
Latin in pretty much the same way AFAIK. (In the case of Latin the phonology
was questionable maybe, but with Sanskrit such things were better documented.)
No two people ever understand a language in _exactly_ the same way of course,
but when learning a fixed version of a classical language, the differences are
relatively minor.

~~~
asveikau
Latin was a dead language when both Gauss and Copernicus were alive. Even
within the time of the Roman empire, it went through crazy amounts of changes.

For example it's pretty common to find people who can read Latin well but
pretty rare to find people who understand in what time period and circumstance
an /m/ would have nasalized the vowel before it. Could they "speak Latin"? It
wouldn't really be the same. It's a bit like learning Esperanto.

I think it's quite likely that modern communities speaking Sanskrit are a
little blinded to this sort of thing by pride in the cultural heritage and
identity that Sanskrit represents.

My larger point is we don't really know what kind of utterance a casual street
speaker of Latin or Sanksrit was capable of. It's very possible that something
like a palindromic poem is impressive to modern eyes and ears in part because
native speakers no longer exist.

Another example in English. You might be surprised at how people without much
education can improvise a freestyle rap. How will that look to somebody
studying current English in 1000 years? Will someone make comments like yours
about the astounding difficulty of execution? I mean, yes, people doing this
are clever. Not everyone can pull it off. But it is derived from existing
casual speech patterns and recognizable as such.

~~~
svat
> _Latin was a dead language when both Gauss and Copernicus were alive._

That was exactly my point, and the reason I picked those examples; I guess I
could have been clearer in my previous comment. The author of the poem being
discussed in this thread, whose name was Māgha, lived in the 7th century. It
is hard to be sure exactly when Sanskrit stopped evolving as a spoken language
and became "frozen" into its classical form (or rather, the naturally evolving
language stopped being called Sanskrit), but one date conventionally taken is
that of Pāṇini, who lived in possibly the 4th or 5th century BCE. So at the
time Māgha was born, Sanskrit was a “dead” language (in that sense) for about
a thousand years, give or take a few centuries. He would have learned the
language not as his primary spoken tongue of everyday life, but more as the
language of education and scholarship, somewhat similar to the way Gauss or
Copernicus would have learned Latin, and the way we learn Sanskrit today.
That's what I meant in my previous comment by:

> both modern speakers and [Māgha] are from centuries after [Sanskrit] was the
> spoken language of the street […] when learning a fixed version of a
> classical language, the differences are relatively minor.

Now, we can be very certain that the kinds of constrained poetry we see here
are the result of arduous (and masterly) construction and not a product of
casual speech patterns, because:

1\. On general linguistic grounds: constraints like two-dimensional
palindromes and the cakrabandha (where every third syllable of the fourth line
matches a specific syllable of the first three lines, and certain annuli spell
out something meaningful), are not discernible to the ear (unlike say, rhyme
or assonance).

We never see something like it produced in daily speech (in English or any
language), and when it is done (see Oulipo and similar), it is with much
effort (and the resulting language—e.g. the “Pilish” of Mike Keith, or “A
Void” by Adair—can sound slightly stilted, which is the case with several of
Māgha's poems too).

In Sanskrit, no one produced such stuff in the centuries when it was a
language of daily speech.

2\. Even in the centuries before and after Māgha, only very few authors have
managed it. Looking at modern speakers (which is a reasonable proxy; see
above), it takes a rare skill, and the distance between not speaking Sanskrit
and fluently speaking idiomatic Sanskrit is still smaller than the distance
between the latter and being able to compose like this.

You have a great point though, which applies to many situations other than
this one: for example, I might hear someone today rapping in Old English (the
language of Beowulf) and be impressed, but for someone living back then, it
may have been (like the "an ordinary job" comment that started this thread)
just natural and requiring only slightly above-average competence.

------
qznc
Would you accept that in a Hangman game? It beats my previous favorite
Eyjafjallajökull. Much harder to memorize though.

------
mad44
Watch till the end.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gG62zay3kck](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gG62zay3kck)

~~~
mleonhard
"Rhabababerbarbarabarbarbarenbartbarbierbierbarbärbel"

52 letters :)

------
godelmachine
>> _The 34th stanza is the 33rd stanza written backwards, with a different
meaning. Finally, the 27th stanza is an example of what has been called "the
most complex and exquisite type of palindrome ever invented".[19] It may also
be thought of as a syllabic Sator Square. Sanskrit aestheticians call it
sarvatobhadra, "perfect in every direction" — it yields the same text if read
forwards, backwards, down, or up:_

It is instances like these when I utterly regret my school not having offered
Sanskrit back then. Now I highly doubt if I would ever get the opportunity to
learn this beautiful language, ever!

Fun fact → In the '80s, a NASA engineer discovered that Sanskrit can be a more
viable language in NLP than any formally defined programming language[1]
courtesy its _constrained grammatical states_ (to coin a phrase)

Ref.

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

~~~
srean
This claim of NASA endorsing Sanskrit has been debunked many times.
Regardless, its a favorite among a particular milieu [0] -- our beautiful
heritage stabbed in the back by some evil conspiracy -- and some such. Made up
stuff like that hurts the cause more than it promotes.

[0][https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/speaking-
sanskrit-...](https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/speaking-sanskrit-
keeps-diabetes-cholesterol-at-bay-bjp-mp/story-JXglNd7cotTEdnrlUXEdzK.html)

[1] [https://www.quora.com/Is-Sanskrit-compulsory-in-NASA-for-
AI-...](https://www.quora.com/Is-Sanskrit-compulsory-in-NASA-for-AI-
Artificial-Intelligence-research)

~~~
svat
The “claim of NASA endorsing Sanskrit” is an exaggeration that is easy to
debunk, but the paper itself is real: it presents (though in a vague way)
something of historical interest, namely a dialect of Sanskrit that was (and
is) used for giving precise definitions and statements, attempting to avoid
ambiguity. Of course from one perspective this is “just” a historical
curiosity and an irrelevant dead end as far as AI is concerned, while from
other it's an important landmark in the intellectual history of the world.
(See my other comments in this thread if they're visible; trying to avoid
repeating myself.)

Aside, just remembered: there's a talk on this Navya-nyāya tradition that I
listened to recently:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRiv7uv_C90&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRiv7uv_C90&feature=youtu.be&list=PL01ilcOJQjCHb8zBKqniz8IEo38y1xE6i&t=470)
(covers Navya-nyāya in the 2nd half, but may be hard to follow if you're not
familiar with the Sanskrit tradition). For a Western audience, these ideas may
be easier to understand via the papers I mentioned at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14295285](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14295285),
or something like the “History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps” podcast, which
is good in general (but which covers only the older nyāya and not navya-nyāya
so far, in its 62 episodes
[https://historyofphilosophy.net/india](https://historyofphilosophy.net/india)).

~~~
srean
Of course the paper is real, but not one that's particularly influential,
notable, novel or one that led to anything more substantial. Regardless, its
frequently used to push a political agenda of Indian/Hindu superiority. Either
overtly, or covertly.

~~~
svat
Here's how I think about these things. You can either react to the extreme
version, focus on the political consequences, and what the person-on-the-
street says/thinks. This is totally valid, and closer to what happens “on the
ground”. Or you can (if you can afford not to worry about it) take delight in
intellectual curiosity, approach everything like a student, trying to be as
scholarly and scrupulously honest as possible, gently correcting people when
they make exaggerated claims, etc. I mean, no matter how much you use strong
words like “debunked” etc., people will tend to just ignore it and keep
bringing up the same dumb thing as evidence of whatever-they-imagine and only
think you're ignoring/fighting them, while instead if you non-
confrontationally give them a proper judicious account of its role, they at
least have a positive valence towards what you're saying and there's a chance
the accurate version will sink in. Even if not, it's also good practice for
being able to extract whatever good is in something: haṃsa-kṣira-nyāya or
nīra-kṣīra-viveka as they say in Sanskrit.

(I think I already mentioned this paper being a “dead end” etc in my comments,
even in my first comment on this topic from 3 years ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14295285](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14295285).
BTW it did lead to something more: excitement over the paper led to a
conference the next year in India—see the only other paper of Rick Briggs
listed in DBLP—though that too fizzled out and led nowhere... I haven't even
been able to find any record of its proceedings being published anywhere.
Anyway, telling people about all this creates a mystery and raises
questions—if a lot of people putting their minds together couldn't produce
anything useful for AI from it, maybe it's not so useful for AI after all?—and
invites them to reconsider their position, and generally leads to better
outcomes than quick debunking and denial of false claims, IMO.)

~~~
srean
I think we are more in agreement than in opposition. The two point of views
that you mentioned should not even be complementary. Delighting in the
intellectual marvel should not stop one from calling out abuse.

~~~
svat
Yes we are in agreement! There is no opposition, and if at all there is any
disagreement it is at most one of focus and emphasis, not anything
substantive. Consider the chain:

<Fun fact: X, imperfectly stated> → <NASA engineer says Sanskrit can be used
for knowledge representation> → <NASA endorses Sanskrit for AI> → <Sanskrit is
good for AI> → <Sanskrit is the best language for computers> → <claims of
superiority> → <Y: the thing you might be actually worried about>.

In any such chain X→…→Y, I think it's possible that worry about Y can hinder
ability to appreciate X on its own terms as an intellectual delight, so it
requires some conscious mental effort of stepping back or “depoliticization”,
to do so. Then, for “calling out abuse” (as you said, they're not
complementary), one again has a choice of _form_. A shooting-down approach,
especially one where one debunks something actually further ahead in the
chain, has its advantages — it is strong, and plays well to third parties and
to those already on one's side. But it can be polarizing, and poor at
convincing the person who was saying X. It seems preferable to me to start by
agreeing with X (in this case X too was imperfectly stated so actually one
would have to reach back and agree with the correct W), then add a cautionary
note about the next steps in the chain that are not true. But this is
ultimately a matter of preference no doubt. After all, those who react
strongly seem to be more successful in most outcomes other than convincing the
person they're reacting to. :-)

Anyway I guess it is a bit pointless and too meta to be talking about talking,
so I'll end here; will just for concreteness repeat the correct (AFAIK)
version of the “fun fact”: there existed/exists an interesting and
sophisticated special-purpose usage of (a subset of) Sanskrit that was used to
avoid (reduce?) the ambiguity that is common all natural languages, and
Sanskrit in particular, and this was (roughly) pointed out in a paper in the
80s that caught some interest because of the author's employer (NASA) and
publication venue (AI Magazine), though there are much better sources, and
though it is not actually any more useful for AI than the typical approaches
used (even at that time) for knowledge-representation.

~~~
godelmachine
>> _Sanskrit that was used to avoid (reduce?) the ambiguity that is common all
natural languages_

I did not even bring up any other naturally spoken language. The author wants
to say that we have a subset in Sanskrit using which can be much better than a
formally defined language. There wasn’t even an attempt to bring any other
naturally spoken language in the picture.

~~~
svat
To be clear, I wasn't attributing anything to you: I wasn't saying that either
you or Briggs mentioned other languages; I was just describing the fact that
the Navya-Nyāya language was designed to reduce the ambiguities that natural
Sanskrit has, like all natural languages — sorry if that wasn't clear.

As for the other part, consider what this NN language was designed for: to
give precise definitions and statements, for use in debate, dialectic, etc.
While it is plausible that some of these properties could make it suitable for
similar purposes on a computer too, it also had other constraints (designed
for humans, had to be grammatical Sanskrit, etc). How likely do you think it
is that it can be much better than anything that could be designed for
computers, without those constraints? Besides, if it were so optimized for
computers it would be slightly worse for its actual purpose of human
communication in debates. Have you considered the fact that Briggs does not
claim so in his paper either?

------
jinushaun
Reminds me of "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo
buffalo":

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffal...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo)

------
1MachineElf
I'm not sure if this was one of Neal Stephenson's inspirations for his novel
Snow Crash, but if it wasn't, then I expect he would be pleasantly surprised
by this real-world demo of grammar hackery.

------
yumraj
Even though I had Sanskrit as the third language from 6-8 grades, the way it
was taught was mere memorization. I still remember some till today.

I wish I was taught better.

Are there any sources to relearn Sanskrit from the ground up.

~~~
Ayesh
I grew up in Sri Lanka, where you can go to Buddhist schools from grade 1-12
every Sundays, and they teach a fairly good amount of Paali and Sanskrit.
Sanskrit itself is not something you learn, but Paali resembles a lot of it to
a point that you can walk up to a document from a thousand years ago and still
grasp what it means.

I studied only for 4 years, but I'm native Sinhalese, which isn't really that
far from Sanskrit.

~~~
yumraj
> I studied only for 4 years, but I'm native Sinhalese, which isn't really
> that far from Sanskrit.

It's interesting you say that. My native tongue is Hindi, but growing up I had
a friend whose mother tongue was Malayalam, and according to him Malayalam was
closer to Sanskrit than Hindi.

Do you know if there are similarities between Sinhalese and Malyalam?

~~~
Ayesh
A lot! The script is similar (circles and more circles), and when I watch
Malayalam movies, I pick quite a few words.

------
dekken_
similar but different
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3_tRPRt9x8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3_tRPRt9x8)

------
windex
My Indian work colleagues do this a lot. Sanskrit+NASA+India+AI = super power.
How is this hacker news?

~~~
jbotz
How is this _not_ linguistic hackery?

~~~
satishgupta
... hackery of epic scale.

