About the Course

Introduction

Vyakarana darshana is India’s science of language. It throws light on two aspects of language: sound (shabda) and sense (artha). It offers a scientific perspective on the nature of shabda, classification of shabda, the concept of vaakya and pada and the types of padas. It identifies certain common roots from which all possible padas can be derived. Different languages employ different conventions in pada formation, but the rules governing the classification and derivation of padas is common.This common framework has been elucidated in ashtadhyayi in the context of Sanskrit.

Sanskrit vyakarana needs to be studied in two dimensions:: shaabdika or word formation and aarthika or meaning or semantics. Though ashtadhyayi treatise covers both dimensions, majority of its study nowadays focuses on the shaabdika dimension. In this, there are two traditional methods of study:

• Prakriya krama, which studies how specific word forms and conjugations are achieved, by explaining sutras relevant to those forms, regardless where they are scattered in ashtadhyayi.
• Sutra krama (and its variant Paushpi krama), which studies ashtadhyayi sutras in the order they appear in the text, focussing on their role in word form generation.

In either case, how to understand various sutras is taught. The student is made to memorize as many sutras as possible so that when discovering how a word form is generated, the student can mentally recall which sutras apply in a given situation.

This method of studying ashtadhyayi relies heavily on memorization skills for effective understanding of ashtadhyayi process. It can be very tedious and time-consuming to master ashtadhyayi this way, and requires years of dedicated study, just to master the word formation process (rupa siddhi) of Sanskrit.

Ashtadhyayi as a Computational Engine

However, the advent of computing has opened up a much more rapid way of understanding the shaabdika dimension of Vyakarana and Ashtadhyayi.

The uniqueness of Ashadhyayi lies in its use of Sanskrit as a programming language. Ashtadhyayi sutras are composed using a stylized subset of Sanskrit that avoids the ambiguity of natural languages, and hence can be mechanically interpreted. Its sutras are sentences that describe a context, a condition and a consequence of matching them. Ashtadhyayi adopts a convention of using vibhaktis for sutra words as operators to describe the 3Cs. It minimizes the use of verbs. If one understands the mechanism of interpreting various types of sutras, and how the sutras come together to achieve word synthesis, then one can easily master the shaabdika aspect of ashtadhyayi rapidly.

Sarada Susarla’s PhD thesis [ref 1] under the guidance of Prof. Shivani V. (KSU) and Prof. Tilak Rao (Chanakya U.) has demonstrated that direct machine interpretation of Ashtadhyayi text corpus for rupa siddhi is indeed feasible, in the context of krdanta form generation. An open-source python interpreter called PAIAS [ref 2] has been developed to automate Ashtadhyayi’s word synthesis process via automatic selection and interpretation of the vast sutra corpus. Learning Ashtadhyayi using this tool helps a student get first-hand experience of Ashtadhyayi operation which is manually simulated in traditional methods. It helps avoid having to memorize ashtadhyayi in order to understand it. It liberates time for exploring higher semantic aspects of Vyakarana darshana where Bharat has made seminal contributions beyond the state of the art.

About This Course

This course attempts to teach the rupa siddhi process of Ashtadhyayi by relying on the computational nature of Ashtadhyayi. This approach, the yantra-prakriyaa krama, will dramatically reduce the time and effort to understand ashtadhyayi to a 3-credit course.

Course Objectives

• Gain first-hand appreciation of the systematic word synthesis model of the Sanskrit language.
• Understand the computational logic of Ashtadhyayi.
• Learn how to automate word form generation in Indic languages using the approach of Ashtadhyayi.

Expected Outcomes

• Gain the expertise necessary for Indic language processing.