Rishi Rajpopat

A new interpretation of a 2,500-year-old Sanskrit text upends millennia of debate and affirms an ancient linguist's remarkably sophisticated grammatical system. Around 500 BCE, the Indian scholar Pāṇini wrote a treatise on Sanskrit, the Aṣṭādhyāyī, describing a kind of language machine: an algebraic system of rules for producing grammatically correct word forms. The enormity and elegance of that accomplishment—and the...