Indian scholar at Cambridge solves 2500 year old Sanskrit Grammatical problem

Rishi Rajpopat found that Panini`s `language machine` created almost all grammatically accurate words.

An Indian Ph.D. student at the University of Cambridge has finally solved a Sanskrit grammatical difficulty that has baffled researchers since the 5th century BC. Rishi Atul Rajpopat, 27, apparently decoded a manuscript written by the Sanskrit language master Panini, a master of the ancient Sanskrit language who lived roughly two and a half thousand years ago. Mr. Rajpopat is a Ph.D. student at St. John's College, Cambridge, in the faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies. The student has solved a grammatical puzzle that academicians had been unable to answer since the fifth century BC. Rishi Rajpopat is said to have decoded a text written by Panini, a Sanskrit language expert. Academics claim that the Ashtadhyayi of Panini, a system of rules for deriving or generating new words from root words, has contradictory concepts, leaving many scholars bewildered over which rules to follow to make new words.

In order to address rule conflicts in the language algorithm, Panini designed a meta-rule, which has so far been translated as follows: In the event of a dispute between two rules of equal strength, the rule that appears later in the grammar's serial sequence takes precedence.

Rajpopat has responded that this metarule is frequently misinterpreted. Panini, according to him, intended for the reader to choose the rule that applied to the right side of a word from those that applied to the left, according to the media reports. Using this logic, Rajpopat discovered that Panini's algorithms can indeed generate grammatically perfect words and phrases. Choosing the rule that applies to the word on the right will yield the correct new form guru, settling the issue. Young Rajpopat's work is a response to academics who have been trying for over 2,600 years.