In today's video let's talk about the father
of linguistics Panini who is mainly responsible
for giving us this beautiful and most scientific
language Sanskrit and who should also be called
the first Geek of this world because he's
who developed the first Turing machine
I'm a proud father of two beautiful daughters
and my elder one right now is about 5 years
old so she's right now getting into reading
she can, sort of read words, but since we
live in the U.S. she only gets chance to read
English word because whenever we go outside
everything is written in English and so when
she reads, she can only mostly read English
words and she is having a lot of problem actually.
Whenever she tries to read a word, she always
asks me a question, Daddy, what does this
sounds like.
So whenever she see C she says oh does it
sound like “क” or does it sound like
“स”.
When she sees “u” she asks me Daddy he
does it sound like “अ” or does it sound
like “उ”, so it's such a big problem
for her.
The other day she was reading “ice” on
a vending machine and she read it as “eka”,
so that's the problem that happens with English,
basically an alphabet is there but you don't
really know how it sounds.
It can sound like; “c” can sound like
“c” or it can sound like “s” similarly
“u” can sound like “a” or it can also
sound like “u” and so that confusion is
always there that she is facing.
Now, if we were in India and she was reading
Hindi this problem will never be there.
A sound of a letter is always the same no
matter where it is placed.
“क” will always sound like “क”
or “ज” will always sound like “ज”.
This something which is very unscientific
about English but all our Indian languages
are very scientific in this and for this we
have to actually give credit to Panini.
Panini laid down extensive rules on Sanskrit
grammar and linguistics in his great work
with the name Ashtadhyayi.
It is because of these rules that Sanskrit
is one of the most logical and scientific
languages in this world.
Such is the Brilliance of Panini that is morphological
analysis on how words are formed are more
advanced than nineteenth-century linguist
and his non compounding analysis still forms
the basis of the linguistic theories on compounding
of words in the modern Indian languages.
Now the Brilliance of Panini is just not limited
to the linguistics you realize his true brilliance
when you look at Ashtadhyayi his work.
Now, Ashtadhyayi is a very difficult read
and that is because it is very very dense.
A lot of information is packed in it and it's
all very condensed.
You see Sanskrit grammar is a very extensive
topic and you have to write pages and pages
of rules to really come up with all those
rules.
But Panini was able to compress all of that
into just 40 pages, so how did he do that?
He did that by codifying language itself,
all the rules that were present in the Sanskrit
grammar were all codified into different codes
and then those codes were then presented in
a very rhyming language in his book Ashtadhyayi.
So I you look at Ashtadhyayi, it has about
4,000 sutras, which can be condensed into
40 pages and if somebody remembers the whole
Ashtadhyayi, he can recite it in just a few
hours, but the information that is contained
in it, if you were to expand it, if you were
to take all the rules and write them again
in the form in which he has a rhymed them,
then that'll take about more than thousand
pages to write them all.
So this is really brilliant work on his part
and you can say that he basically developed
a meta-language.
So he was codifying the rules into other codes
and then he codified it and created a new
meta language and that is why he's generally
credited as the first geek because he was
basically writing a computer code, because
in a computer code you're doing the same thing
you're basically taking all these logical
commands and you just create one particular
command for it.
The whole a logical operation is related to
just one command over here the whole rule
is condensed into just one command and so
that's why he is generally credited as the
first geek of this world and you can say that
he is the one who developed the first Turing
machine as such.
So Alan Turing is given the credit for doing
that but here is a good example of something
similar being developed by Panini long time
back about 400 BC or so.
So what else do we know about Panini?
Well scholars say that he lived between 6th
to 4th Century BC he was born in the city
of Shalatula in ancient Gandhar, which is
located at the junction of Indus and Kabul
River in the modern day Pakistan.
Panini's brother Pingala was also a brilliant
mathematician he is the author of the book
Chanda sutra and he's the first person to
be credited with developing the binary code.
So we will talk about him in the future videos.
There is another interesting anecdote about
Panini that gets mentioned in Pancatantra,
where Vishnu Sharma mentions that Panini was
killed by lion.
Now, we don't really know if it is true or
not but that's what is there in the Pancatantra.
Another note to be noticed is that Panini
mentions 10 previous grammarian’s work that
he refers to in his own work.
So we can clearly see that the work that Panini
is presenting in the book Ashtadhyayi is not
mostly his own work, bit most of that work
has been done previously and he is just referring
to them.
So this knowledge has been there for a very
long time.
And a final note, as I have mentioned in my
previous videos also, Sanskrit is a very scientific
language and it got developed of all places
in India and why?
It developed because there was a very grave
need for it.
Now if you notice, then in the old times,
in the Vedic Period it was very important
for the pundits to really pronounce all those
Mantra that are there, very very precisely
because it was that when you pronounce them
precisely then it causes a chain reaction
and things then happen accordingly.
So it was very important that you pronounce
them correctly.
When the written language developed, it became
very very important that you write all those
mantras in Vedas very accurately so that anybody
who is reading them can then pronounce them
very very correctly.
So that is the reason why this very accurate,
scientific, Sanskrit language was actually
developed in India.
It's not that Indians were more brilliant
or things like that, it is just that there
was need for it and so the thing was developed
accordingly.
So I hope that you feel very inspired by the
work of Panini, he was a very brilliant man.
He was the first Geek you can say and he developed
very elaborate rules on linguistics such that
even west now acknowledges him as the father
of linguistics.
