The weeks leading up to Rishi Rajpopat’s great linguistic discovery were not what one would expect.
He spent all day lounging on the banks of the Cam River, looking at the Bridge of Than Tho; late-night cycling through the streets of Cambridge; swim a lot; spend time in libraries with breathtaking views. It was a warm, sunny month.
“After nine months of painstakingly researching my doctoral thesis, I felt like I was getting nowhere and was ready to quit. The frustration of the possibility of failure kept me from enjoying what I truly love – asking questions and solving puzzles. So I decided to close the book and take a month-long break, which turned out to be a game changer,” said the 27-year-old.
The discovery he makes when he returns to his research is what one might expect in a Sherlock Holmes novel; definitely not in real life.
Rajpopat studied the grammar algorithm for Sanskrit created by the scholar Pāṇini some 2,500 years ago. It’s a set of 4,000 rules that allow users to write down grammatically correct Sanskrit words and then sentences, once the root and suffix have been chosen.
Except, no one can make the system work. The big problem is what to do when the two rules of Pāṇini are applied simultaneously. Choose the latter, said Pāṇini. But if one chooses the rule that comes later in the string, the result is usually a non-grammatical mess.
This scholar is considered the father of linguistics. Obviously, if he says the program works, it will. Why doesn’t it work? The question began to haunt Rajpopat.
Century after century, new metal rules were written, in an attempt to “fix” the “problems”. “We’ve all begun to accept this unnecessary workaround as the norm, but one thought that’s been ingrained in me is, why would a genius like Pāṇini let us ‘fix’? What did we miss?”
The answer, it turns out, is hidden in plain sight.
After a summer in the sun, Rajpopat returned to his books and began to study patterns in his work. “Choose the rule that comes later…” He realized that Pāṇini had not meant to choose the rule that came later in sequence; what he means is to choose the rule that applies to the right side of the word.
Used that way, the algorithm works almost without exception, making it possible to construct grammatically correct Sanskrit words. Rajpopat said: “I am very happy to have solved it.
While making his discovery in 2018, Rajpopat finally published his thesis, titled We Trust in Pāṇini: Exploring Algorithms to Resolve Rule Conflicts in Aṣṭādhyāyī, this month. . It made him an overnight celebrity. “I thought this would attract the attention of some academic journals, but did not expect such a warm response. My phone doesn’t stop ringing; people are calling my parents and friends hoping to talk to me. I feel extremely grateful and blessed.”
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Rajpopat grew up in Mumbai, the son of engineers turned science tutor Atul Rajpopat and Bhavna Rajpopat.
He has always loved languages and absorbed them easily. He first learned Sanskrit in high school. He began studying Pāṇini’s grammar out of interest, while pursuing a degree in Economics. His Sanskrit tutor is a retired professor who lives in the vicinity.
Rajpopat says he was mesmerized by Pāṇini’s genius. When he graduated, he had “a burning desire to understand Pāṇini’s excellence in my own way”. He enrolled for a Master’s in Sanskrit at Oxford University and then a PhD at St John’s College, Cambridge, in 2017. He has a penchant for grammar, “but my heart has always set out to ask questions. riddles and hidden meanings, especially in linguistic contexts,” he said.
The code he solved could open new doors to an ancient language. The algorithm runs Pāṇini’s 4,000-rule grammar that can be taught to a computer. Rajpopat, meanwhile, emerges with a renewed respect for the simple question: Why? “I believe it was my willingness and commitment to not learn and relearn that helped me do this,” he says.
Rajpopat, who has studied 12 languages (including Urdu, Persian and Sindhi), is currently studying Ancient Greek at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, and also works as an academic editor for the Encyclopedia. Theological letters are being compiled there.
He is currently in India and says he is completely unprepared for the frenzy his thesis has also caused here. “Congratulations are turning into surprise marriage proposals. It was the hardest thing by far,” he said with a laugh. “But I am incredibly grateful for all the love I have received. I hope this will encourage other students to ask more questions and not be satisfied with the easy answers.”
