4 ms·

TLDR: Sanskrit was formalized very early on.

• svat 9y ago
  Well, yes. Thanks. What I was trying to say is that the formalization is actually great: - it is useful to linguists. (Modern linguistics borrows terms like sandhi and bahuvrihi for example.) - it is acceptable to language users. Poets have continued to compose in the same language, without finding the formalization artificial. - it is interesting even as an achievement of the human mind/culture. A somewhat trivial example, but possibly of interest to the HN audience: the grammar needs to refer to various sets of sounds (like "nasal consonants", "short vowels", "aspirated stops" and so on). To compactly encode these sets, it adopts a curious ordering of the sounds, so that each required set can be represented as a certain substring of that sequence. It turns out that this ordering can be shown to be optimal: see e.g. - Economy and the Construction of the Śivasūtras by Paul Kiparsky, Stanford University http://www.stanford.edu/~kiparsky/Papers/siva-t.pdf http://www.stanford.edu/~kiparsky/Papers/siva-t.pdf - A Mathematical Analysis of Pāṇini’s Śiva sūtras, by Wiebke Petersen, University of Düsseldorf http://user.phil-fak.uni-duesseldorf.de/~petersen/paper/petersen_jolli_proof.pdf http://user.phil-fak.uni-duesseldorf.de/~petersen/paper/pete...
  • shas3 9y ago
    Thanks for the link to Kiparsky's paper on mAheshvarasutraNi. Starting from the system of grouping and ordering, sandhi rules became straightforward to understand. When I first learned the sutras in school, we were presented with a lot of hand-waving and circular reasoning (sandhi rules- sutra grouping - sandhi rules) about why they were ordered in that seemingly arbitrary manner. It is cool that Kiparsky has solved the inverse problem of figuring out Panini's generative system for the grouping and ordering of syllables!