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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 · 4 answers · asked by Anonymous in 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

4 answers

Well, even if we take Briggs at his word that:

1. Sanskrit is remarkable for its flexible syntax and, let's say, semantic density (packing lots of info into each word by case/gender/etc. markers).
[Aside: Latin shares these features but as a result it can also be very vague and the same phrase can usually impart multiple meanings; I would be surprised if Sanskrit is quite as transparent as Briggs argues, although in AI language one can presumably prevent such ambiguities by artificial means]

and

2. These features are desirable for machine language

1 and 2 only suggest, at best, that a machine language based on Sanskrit (whether entirely or just its structure) might be more efficient than inventing new languages and that Sanskrit linguists and programmers have much to learn from one another. Probably programming-language Sanskrit, if anyone were to try it, would still have to conform to some artificial rules.

These hypotheses have no bearing on the culture's relative "intelligence." We can safely bet that they were not thinking, "let's make our language like this so that someday we can talk to machines." Their language developed as any other; they just chose a case system to do what some other languages do with syntax or inflection or extra words. Which system is easier or more efficient or more poetic depends on your perspective (especially the perspective of your native language). "Natural" languages (following Briggs; i.e. normal human languages) develop according to the needs of a group of people and change accordingly. People have different needs in communicating with one another than with computers, and both kinds of languages adapt over time and place as those needs change.

2007-02-15 17:39:34 · answer #1 · answered by ooooo 6 · 1 0

There is no such existence as "Aryan Race" it's just as much of a theory as the ideas of scientology.

And this was never really a question.

2007-02-16 01:10:38 · answer #2 · answered by cyan876 3 · 0 1

I don't get the reference to Aaron...

2007-02-16 00:32:22 · answer #3 · answered by Shinigami 7 · 2 0

You answered your question with your question.....

2007-02-16 00:33:06 · answer #4 · answered by Anonymous · 0 0

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