An Indian Ph.D. student at the University of Cambridge has solved a Sanskrit grammatical conundrum that has baffled experts since the fifth century BC. According to the BBC, Rishi Atul Rajpopat, 27, decoded a book written by Panini, a master of the ancient Sanskrit language who lived around two and a half thousand years ago.
Notably, Rajpopat is a PhD candidate in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at St. John’s College, Cambridge.
According to the Independent’s interpretation of a “metarule” taught by Panini, the rule that comes later in the language’s serial sequence wins in a contest between two rules of equal power.
Rajpopat rejected this traditional interpretation of the metarule, arguing that Panini meant that we should choose the rule applicable to the right side of a word over the rule applicable to the left side. He came to the conclusion that Panini’s “language machine” produced grammatically correct words with few exceptions.
“I had a eureka moment in Cambridge. After nine months of trying to crack this problem, I was almost ready to quit, I was getting nowhere. So I closed the books for a month and just enjoyed the summer, swimming, cycling, cooking, praying, and meditating. Then, begrudgingly I went back to work, and, within minutes, as I turned the pages, these patterns started emerging, and it all started to make sense,” he told the Independent. It took him another two years to solve the problem.
Elated at the news, Prof Vergiani said, “My student Rishi has cracked it – he has found an extraordinarily elegant solution to a problem which has perplexed scholars for centuries. This discovery will revolutionise the study of Sanskrit at a time when interest in the language is on the rise.”
According to Cambridge University, Sanskrit is only spoken by an estimated 25,000 people in India out of a population of over one billion.