Pāṇini’s Aṣṭādhyāyī: A 2500-Year-Old Computer Program, Its Style, Tradition, and Enigmas
Published: 8 February 2023
Dr Ben-Dor will discuss the overall characteristic of the Aṣṭādhyāyī and its prominent features.
Date: Tuesday April 19 2023
Location: 4 Professors' Square, 205 Seminar Room
Time: 14:00
Speaker: Dr. Sharon Ben-Dor
Abstract:
The name of the ancient grammarian Pāṇini has made headlines recently, when a PhD researcher from Cambridge claimed to have deciphered a code in this ancient text to offer a new reading (see “PhD student solves 2,500-year-old Sanskrit problem,” BBC News, 15/12/2022). Leaving aside the headlines, only a few scholars worldwide can explain what this is all about, and Dr Ben-Dor is one of them. The lecture is an introduction to the Aṣṭādhyāyī (Eight Chapters) of Pāṇini (5th BCE), the Indian Sanskrit grammarian, that describes the Sanskrit language. This text consists of approximately 4000 grammatical rules aiming to generate correct speech in Sanskrit and and they are comparable to instructions of a modern computer program. Dr Ben-Dor will discuss the overall characteristic of the Aṣṭādhyāyī and its prominent features, namely, the sūtra (aphorism) style and the use of anuvṛtti, meaning repetition of the terms from preceding sūtras, Pāṇini’s metalanguage, and the use of markers. In addition, he will elaborate on the commentarial tradition of Pāṇini’s grammar and how the commentators explain ambiguities in the Aṣṭādhyāyī. At the end of the presentation, he will briefly discuss the recently proposed solution to the “2,500-year-old Sanskrit problem”, contemporary studies on the Aṣṭādhyāyī, and some challenges that the Aṣṭādhyāyī poses for modern scholars.
Bio:
Sharon Ben-Dor is a Sanskrit scholar specialising in the Sanskrit grammatical tradition. He has lived and studied in India for lengthy periods beginning in the 1990s. He studied for an Acharya degree at Sampurnanand Sanskrit University in Varanasi (1997-1999) and was awarded his Ph.D. degree by the University of Helsinki (2009). He has also been a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania (2004) and a research fellow at the Sanskrit library and the PI of the project Tracing the Sources of the Kāśikāvṛtti (2016--2018). His most recent publication is “On the Necessity of Immediate Sequence (ānantarya) in the Aṣṭādhyāyī Śabdānugamaḥ” (in: Indian Linguistic studies in Honor of George Cardona, edited by Peter M. Scharf, 2021). In addition to his proficiency in the language and its grammatical tradition, Dr Ben-Dor is also proficient in Urdu, and Hindi, alongside his proficiency as a performing sitar artist.
First published: 8 February 2023