In the past twenty years, much time, effort, and money has been expended on designing an unambiguous representation of natural languages to make them accessible to computer processing. These efforts have centered around creating schemata designed to parallel logical relations with relations expressed by the syntax and semantics of natural languages, which are clearly cumbersome and ambiguous in their function as vehicles for the transmission of logical data. Understandably, there is a widespread belief that natural languages are unsuitable for the transmission of many ideas that artificial languages can render with great precision and mathematical rigor.
But this dichotomy, which has served as a premise underlying much work in the areas of linguistics and artificial intelligence, is a false one. There is at least one language, Sanskrit, which for the duration of almost 1,000 years was a living spoken language with a considerable literature of its own. Besides works of literary value, there was a long philosophical and grammatical tradition that has continued to exist with undiminished vigor until the present century. Among the accomplishments of the 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. This article demonstrates that a natural language can serve as an artificial language also, and that much work in AI has been reinventing a wheel millenia old.

The enterprise of computer science has two fundamental elements. The element is to develop techniques that make the elucidation of the computational structure of nature and the mind easier. The second element is the creation of new computing algorithms and machines that have powerful cognitive and computational abilities: this includes development of new techniques of representing and manipulating knowledge, inference and deduction. The tasks of representing and processing knowledge with a somewhat different emphasis has parallels in many ancient disciplines. Thus grammarians have long considered questions of relating facts about the physical world and
cognition to linguistic expressions. Likewise logicians have developed formal structures to relate events and draw inferences from them. This is seen best in the work of ancient Indian logicians and grammarians. It has been argued by Ingalls, Staal, Matilal, Briggs, Kak and others1 that many contemporary developments in formal logic, linguistics, and computer science are a rediscovery of the work of these ancient masters. But apart from the question of a correct history of ideas it raises the following important question of significance to Sanskritists as well as cognitive and computer scientists: Are there other rules in ancient Indian logic and grammar that may be of use in making further advance in cognitive and computer sciences?

Pāṇini's use of metarules, transformations, and recursion together make his grammar as rigorous as a modern Turing machine.[The Backus-Naur form (Panini-Backus form) or BNF grammars used to describe modern programming languages have significant similarities to Pāṇini grammar rules. Pāṇini's grammar can be considered to be the world's first formal system, well before the 19th century innovations of Gottlob Frege and the subsequent development of mathematical logic. To design his grammar, Pāṇini used the method of "auxiliary symbols," in which new affixes are designated to mark syntactic categories and the control of grammatical derivations. This technique was rediscovered by the logician Emil Post and is now a standard method in the design of computer programming languages.

A treatise called Astadhyayi (or Astaka ) is Panini's major work. It consists of eight chapters, each subdivided into quarter chapters. In this work Panini distinguishes between the language of sacred texts and the usual language of communication. Panini gives formal production rules and definitions to describe Sanskrit grammar. Starting with about 1700 basic elements like nouns, verbs, vowels, consonants he put them into classes. The construction of sentences, compound nouns etc. is explained as ordered rules operating on underlying structures in a manner similar to modern theory. In many ways Panini's constructions are similar to the way that a mathematical function is defined today.

Originally posted by Hanslune
reply to post by qbik2008

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Hehe, howdy qbik

its the old Sitchin dodge of saying you can really read the documents not like the old fuddy duddy scholars.

Originally posted by qbik2008
reply to post by Indigo_Child

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From what I have gleaned from my own understanding...is that Sitchin is "Close"...and his arguements may very well be valid...but from a limited "Thought Form...

I do not propose that I have all of the "Keys" to Enlightenment...as they are vast and never ending...and they are "Dynamic" in "Nature"....but...this begins to make one wonder about their very existence in "Nature"..it is a never ending question...

Regarding 'pottery' well there is pottery around today too, so that does not mean we are not advanced. However, I understand your criticism, I myself do not beleive the IVC was a post-21st century technology, because if it was something would have remained from it. As it was not flooded, there should be advanced materials, parts of machines etc. The reason it cannot be found is because the Aryan civilisation is pre-glacial. There was a post-21st century civilisation but more than 10,000 years ago. It was destroyed by superfloods.