The Indian grammarian Pāṇini wanted to exactly specify what Sanskrit grammar was in the shortest possible length. As a result, he did some crazy stuff:
Pāṇini’s theory of morphological analysis was more advanced than any equivalent Western theory before the 20th century. His treatise is generative and descriptive, uses metalanguage and meta-rules, and has been compared to the Turing machine wherein the logical structure of any computing device has been reduced to its essentials using an idealized mathematical model.
There are two surprising facts about this:
His grammar was written in the 4th century BC.
People then failed to build on this machinery to do things like formalise the foundations of mathematics, formalise a bunch of linguistics, or even do the same thing for languages other than Sanskrit, in a way that is preserved in the historical record.
I’ve been obsessing about this for the last few days.
The Indian grammarian Pāṇini wanted to exactly specify what Sanskrit grammar was in the shortest possible length. As a result, he did some crazy stuff:
There are two surprising facts about this:
His grammar was written in the 4th century BC.
People then failed to build on this machinery to do things like formalise the foundations of mathematics, formalise a bunch of linguistics, or even do the same thing for languages other than Sanskrit, in a way that is preserved in the historical record.
I’ve been obsessing about this for the last few days.