Rishi Rajpopat, "Panini's Perfect Rule: A Modern Solution to an Ancient Problem in Sanskrit Grammar" (Harvard UP, 2025)

“In Pāṇini's case, his goal was not to describe language or to produce a conventional grammar either. When we say Pāṇini wrote a grammar of Sanskrit, which is an ancient Indo-European language, what he was doing is he was trying to build a linguistic machine. It seeks to represent linguistic information or language itself in mechanical terms, in mechanistic terms.”

“Then in 2022, Rishi Rajpopat, a PhD student at Cambridge, said he’d figured out how to unravel Panini’s work to create a cohesive set of rules—and potentially wiped away centuries of commentary. The announcement made headlines and led to some grumbling among other Sanskrit professors.”

“In the event of a conflict, apply the rule that comes later, going from left to right, because we write Sanskrit from left to right. So, the rule that comes later, as in the operation that applies to the right hand side part, the right hand, the right most part basically, if there are more than two rules. And that, to my surprise, solved all these problems.”

“Whereas in the case of Sanskrit, a lot of that work happens within the peripheries. So there is an affix and often there is an infix and so on. A lot of the action, structurally speaking, happens within the bounds of a word. So you can imagine morphology and phonology do a lot of heavy lifting in an ancient Indo-European language like Sanskrit.”

“We have come to accept complexity and complication as a proxy for brilliance. But I think this is only one of many examples that we have access to as human beings of the fact that simplicity and elegance in presenting a complex web of information is what constitutes genius and not complexity.”

“The tradition interpreted later as the rule that comes later in the serial order of rules, and there are 4,000 of them arranged in a particular traditional order. That created many problems, and the first person to notice that was Kātyāyana. All the commentators that came after him did exactly that. You can imagine how unimaginably complex things got based on the mistake that the first commentator made.”

“However, this is an algorithm that Pāṇini has devised. What is an algorithm? It is a clear set of instructions, so that you might be able to always achieve the desirable outcome. In mechanics, the fact is Pāṇini had created what I call a perfect algorithm to tackle the problem of rule conflict, which was misunderstood right from the first commentator's time.”