Remembering our roots
When the tablets of
In the past three decades, much time and money has been spent on trying to find an unambiguous method of representation of natural languages to make them accessible to computer processing. It is accepted widely that natural languages are unsuitable for the transmission of many ideas that artificial languages can render with great precision and mathematical rigor. But a report produced by the NASA scientist Rick Briggs, on Sanskrit and Artificial Intelligence, states that this dichotomy is a false one. He says that there is in fact a language, Sanskrit, that had been the spoken language for more than 1000 years, whose grammar has all the requisites of an artificial language. To summarize his report, the semantic network of Sanskrit is a context-free one. For e.g. the English sentence “Rama kills Ravana”, can be written in Sanskrit as “Ramah Ravanam Vadathi” or “Ravanam Ramah Vadathi” or “Vadathi Ramah Ravanam” or in any other way the sentence could be formed. This is because a noun’s property of being a subject or object does not depend on its position in the sentence as in most other languages, but in the form of the noun itself. Thus even if the verb appears before the noun, since the subject and object are clear, the sentence has no way of being misinterpreted. This makes instructions in Sanskrit unequivocal. Understandably, this feature gives poets a very high degree of freedom. This is one of the reasons why Sanskrit is sometimes referred to as the most poetic language. The Ramayana consisted of 24,000 verses and the Mahabharata with more than 74,000 verses, long prose passages, and about 1.8 million words in total, is one of the longest epic poems in the world. The poetic freedom given by Sanskrit is what has made epics of such magnitude to be written as poems, instead of direct prose.
The older form of Sanskrit utilized in epic literature—namely the Ramayana and Mahabharata—was slightly less strict in its grammatical codification. The form of Sanskrit which has been used for the last 2500 years is known today as classical Sanskrit. That Sanskrit is a language of the Hindus alone is a misconception for it is also the liturgical language of Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism. Further, it must be considered only as a language, just as English is considered only a language and not the language of Christians. The Sanskrit literature is not only rich in drama, art and poetry but also in scientific, religious and philosophical texts. It is a sad state for the language that these texts are unable to be read now by a majority of the people. Since the 1990s, efforts to revive spoken Sanskrit have been increasing. Organizations like the Samskrta Bharati are conducting Speak Sanskrit workshops to popularize the language. We as Indians must actively try and restore the language, for knowledge which has been our nation’s greatest wealth, found its first words in Sanskrit.
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