Researchers believe Sanskrit and computers are a perfect fit. In 1985, Rick Briggs, a researcher for NASA, published a paper on the potential uses of Sanskrit as a machine language. Natural languages are basically too imprecise for use as machine languages. Thus programmers have been forced to create artificial languages.
However, in Briggs' paper, he hailed Sanskrit as an exception. "Among the accomplishments of the [Sanskrit] grammarians can be reckoned a method for paraphrasing Sanskrit in a manner that is identical not only in essence but in form with current work in Artificial Intelligence. A natural language can serve as an artificial language also, and that much work in AI has been reinventing a wheel millennia old."
According to Briggs, some of the factors that make Sanskrit such a perfect machine language are that the word order of its sentences is not strict. For example, consider the sentence "Raamah Phalam Kaadhathi." All the six sentences formed from the various combinations of these three words carry the same meaning. For instance, "Phalam Raamah Kaadhathi" also means "Raama eats fruit," where as in English, obviously, "Fruit eats Raama" will give a very wrong meaning to the sentence.
2007-02-15
16:28:50
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4 answers
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Society & Culture
➔ Languages
Sanskrit's rich case structure enables one to get a lot of information from a verb. For example, "patithavan" indicates that it is a verb in past tense, third person, male, and singular number, in addition to indicating the root "pat" that means "reading." In other words, the full meaning of "patithavaan" will be: an action "reading" is taking place in the past by a single male third person.
Being a language used for human interaction, Sanskrit is not absolutely free from ambiguity. But the extent to which its ambiguity obstructs the analysis is significantly less.
2007-02-15
16:31:23 ·
update #1