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For context of Non-Indians: though ancient, there is little evidence Sanskrit ever was a common spoken language among laymen. It was the language primarily used for religious purposes. It was/is a language of high culture and political elites.
Coming back to the premise of the paper, the grammar of this language is declared to be sufficiently easy to disambiguify such that it's easier for computers to understand. Just to put it in context, this property is actually a part of many other languages including japanese. Pro tip: Most of japanese grammar can be covered with a handful of BNF grammar! Being an indian I know one other language spoken in the south of India that exhibits this property as well - Tamil. Equally ancient as sanskrit but widely spoken language even as of 2021.
Point being, the intention of the paper, though it sounds benign, there is a political context to it which cannot be set aside completely.
> primarily used for religious purposes
*intellectual purposes. The constant religion-washing of Indian intellectual history is colonial-era propaganda, for lack of a better term. It has gone so far that now the vast majority of people think there is nothing more to India's intellectual past than Hinduism. A very substantive portion of Sanskrit literature, if not the majority, deals with non-religious topics such as linguistics, logic, poetics, astronomy, rhetoric, mineralogy, statecraft, geography, and more.
I agree with your main point though.
Thank you for this comment. So true. The colonialists came with their world view, made the Indians feel inferior to subjugate them. Indians in turn have fetishized this colonial view and have self hated on their own culture as a result, to the delight and as intended by colonialists. Part of this self hate is this conflagration of Sanskrit with Hinduism, and while the two were closely related, there is such a rich intellectual culture of Indian thought (Both Sanskrit and non Sanskrit thought) that can be appreciated while still being āmodernā, letās call it. I really wish more Indians would understand this.
>The colonialists came with their world view, made the Indians feel inferior to subjugate them.
It is still going on. There is a reason a gang rape in an Indian village becomes global news on BBC and CNN but gang rapes in other countries don't get anywhere the same attention.
The current rape hysteria about India is as old as European colonization and even Karl Marx wrote about:
>During the Indian Rebellion of 1857, known as "India's First War of Independence" to the Indians and as the "Sepoy Mutiny" to the British, Indian sepoys rebelled en masse against the East India Company's rule over India. Incidents of rape committed by Indian sepoys against British women and children were reported in the English press, particularly after British civilians fell into Indian hands after sieges such as at Cawnpore. However, after the rebellion was suppressed, detailed analyses by the British government concluded that although Indian sepoys had engaged in massacres of British civilians after they captured them, there had never been one single instance of war rape committed by the sepoys.[103] One such account published by The Times, regarding an incident where forty-eight British girls as young as fourteen and ten had been raped by the Indian sepoys in Delhi, was criticised as an obvious fabrication by German author Karl Marx, who pointed out that the story was written by a clergyman in Bangalore, while the rebellion was mostly confined to the Punjab region.[104]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wartime_sexual_violence#Indian...
This has a modern parallel; anglophone Indian journalists write about local crime in a highly exaggerated manner to get more clicks and views from a global audience.
Nothing to do with colonialism. Present day right wing will characterize Sanskrit as word of God
Just because people are perceiving the "present day right wing [characterizing] Sanskrit", doesn't mean that everyone interprets & connects that with Sanskrit.
I engage with the language through Yoga, mantras and chanting,ā¦ and zero politicians interrupt that process, nor do I think about them.
Sanskrit has lived even before humans invented the idea of "the right wing".
None of what you describe is actually engaging with language.
Politicians donāt have to interrupt. They just have to make it a part of their agenda and spread fake pride to the masses. Itās better than opium.
For context of non-Indians and Indians:
Sanskrit is used to refer to several different languages. It's often ambiguous which one people are referring to when they say Sanskrit. Classical Sanskrit is the only one which wasn't spoken as a common language.
Classical Sanskrit -- the language codified by amongst other Panini, around the 5th century BC, which was used for religious and secular purposes for high culture and amongst the political elites.
At this time, some of the other languages now called Sanskrit had turned into the "Middle Indo-Aryan languages", including Pali, and the Prakrits, whose descendents now include the modern Indo-Aryan languages of northern India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka.
Vedic Sanskrit -- the language of the Vedas (1700BC-600BC, approximately), believed in its earliest forms to be the common languages which then became some of the modern north Indian languages. Classical Sanskrit is a codification of Vedic Sanskrit.
Broadly -- any Old Indo-Aryan language, including the pieces of Mitanni Aryan attested in inscriptions in northern Iraq/Syria/Turkey embedded in other language texts including Kikkuli's Horse training manual (mostly in Hittite, except where he uses "Mitanni Aryan" words in glosses and defines them), and king names in the Hurrian language, which are meaningful when interpreted as Sanskrit.
> its earliest forms to be the common languages which then became some of the modern north Indian languages.
Baseless claim. Sanskrit is not a special ancestor to North Indian languages and thereās nothing that separates North Indian languages from southern ones. Tamil has far more influence on northern Indian languages and other Indian languages including Sanskrit than Sanskrit.
What do you mean by "there's nothing that separates North Indian languages from southern ones"? They're from two distinct language families, aren't they?
Based on what? You canāt just say so because of geographic or racial reasons.
wait.. put ref when you are saying " political context to it which cannot be set aside completely.".
What political context, are you talking about. I am not linguist or AI expert. But most of your so facts are of no where related to paper as well as authenticity of the work.
Check the author as well as date of the paper.
This paper has been repeatedly quoted by the far right of India on how one of the elitist ways of doing something is superior and ahead of time. I saw another comment here which linked to a specific instance of usage.
I know the author's intention might be benign. I know the paper dates back to the 80's. But seriously, read through the paper and conclude for yourself if a similar argument can't be made for any of the hundreds of languages in existence today.
Separately from anything else.
Just because the far right quotes something does not mean that something is either wrong, or political.
This is true throughout the world. Simply saying āthe far right likes it so it is badā, is itself a suspect claim.
give credit where credit is due - the rest is bloviation, on all sides
Interestingly anything Indian mentioned in this forum most of the time sounds chauvinistic to me. Not this comment itself but the point it makes at the end says what I mean. Thereās this effort trying to appear distinguished.
Indian right wing is a formidable force. They have a deep sense of entitlement and more than that a deep sense of resentment towards the west. Youāll see artifacts of them coping, gerrymandering and twisting reality to serve ideological purposes. The current government is particularly interested in āprideā more than any modern democracy
For a fact, this paper had been quoted and superficially extended several times by Sanskrit scholars I have met in the past. Typical arguments include the 'semantics is suitable for knowledge extraction', to 'replacing English as the modicum of computer instruction set' (supported by claims for disambiguity in grammar) [1,2]. There is no evidence to support these ideas. Like 'lewisjoe', I am from the same subcontinent and share the very same opinion. The reasons are more political signaling and intellectual statement delivery than actual science.[3]
A similar claim that I have heard from half baked biologists is that gene constituents ACTG will replace binary encoding in future computing (because ACTG have 4 elements as compared to binary 2, and we are the living proof it works!). While genes were researched in MSR for high density storage (Source: yours truly ex-MSR alumnus working with CS+genetics team), there is no hard evidence a base-4 biological system will inherently perform better than the mathematical base-2. We always had octal and hexadecimal bases. These have their strength and weakness. But from the CPU perspectives, base-2 perfectly encodes HI and LO voltage states and hence the adoption.
I wish such researchers took a bit of efforts to investigate their claim's feasibility and the underlying processing structure before making grand statements about computational roadmaps.
1.
https://bstrategyhub.com/sanskrit-is-the-best-language-for-a...
2.
https://scroll.in/article/750526/how-sanskrit-came-to-be-con...
3.
https://www.firstpost.com/india/the-sanskrit-non-controversy...
So short summary: This paper from the 1980's, by a researcher then associated with NASA Ames Research Center basically states that the Sanskrit linguistical and grammatical traditions had mechanisms for describing words and their relations (between the 5th century BC, through the 15th century AD), that didn't make it to Western grammatical traditions until the mid 20th century.
These same relations are those that were used in Artificial Intelligence linguistic models, and given that the Paninian grammar could fairly unambiguously represent Sanskrit, it would be possible to map Sanskrit into a programmatic model for natural language processing in computers.
Note that through decades of misintepretation in the popular press, this has become, "Sanskrit is the ideal language for programming in computers, or even "NASA has endorsed Sanskrit as the ideal language for programming computers".
Panini's grammar of Sanskrit is an incredible artifact, all the more so since it was likely composed and transmitted entirely orally at first. It is a completely formalized generative grammar of Sanskrit morphophonemics:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C4%81%E1%B9%87ini
Panini was a genius. Grew up learning the grammar and it helped me in so many countless ways.
PÄį¹ini has a couple of millennia on Chomsky's language hierarchy! How cool is that?
Sadly even Paniniās contributions are always presented in s religious context which is such a shame. The man invented Buckus Naur form 2000 years ago and thatās how we honor him
I heard a talk many years ago at a AAAI conference on this topic. Really cool that a natural language can be unambiguous.
Another language some people believe would make for better human-computer interaction is Lojban. Unfortunately, despite having been around for decades, it hasn't made much progress in this area.
Published: 1985-03-15