I have to say, as someone who studied Sanskrit grammar in the paninian system, and also mathematics in University how mathematical the Paninian grammar is, incredibly algebraic. Prefixes and suffixes combine to change and modify words, words can be joined together to create new words. Though I’m sure these features are found in other languages.
Another interesting note is that Vedic mantras are sometimes traditionally learnt and recited in what is known as a Ghana patha. If i were to number the words in a sentence, “The cow jumped over the moon” as 1 2 3 4 5 6 and then if I were to recite the sentence now permuting the words as 1 2 2 1 1 2 3 3 2 1 1 2 3,, 2 3 3 2 2 3 4 4 3 2 2 3 4.... The complexity increases. This is because words can be joined together in Sanskrit. Furthermore each letter in Vedic Sanskrit has three ways of pronouncing it (similar to the Chinese four accents) and these can change as you permute and apply the sandhi rules as well.
I haven’t seen such complexity in other languages (though it’s possible it may exist) but such complexity is why it wouldn’t surprise me that the effect could possibly be specific to Sanskrit.
The study hasn't concluded it is specific to Sanskrit. As it is difficult to obtain a sample close to the number resembling people chanting and memorising verses from such a young age for several hours a day.
Previous studies involving other brain activities have shown improvement in grey matter before, for e.g. London Taxi driver in one study showed improvement in brain development.
I was really sad the article didn’t have a video of the hymns it spoke of, I’m similarly really interested now w in seeing an example of pitch accent you speak of in action, could you please link a video which you feel shows it well in play? Thanks!
Sure, here is an example of the rudram chanted in ghanam mode, there is a brief example given in the beginning similar to what i explained in my above comment. This is from the yajur Veda I believe, some scholars date these chants close to 3000 years old. https://youtu.be/5VP-NTPEjGg
It would not surprise me if Sanskrit had some odd features, because Sanskrit as we know it is derived from the language of the ancient hymns.
For about 1000 years before writing starts in India, we have the language developing in the hands of bards singing for ritual reasons to audiences which increasingly could not understand the words. So for many centuries it was evolving under pressures very different from normal language.
Eventually, it regained broader application, but still a an elite language and thus still had unusual evolutionary pressures.
I'm really curious to know, how you came about to study Sanskrit grammar in the Paninian system, that and how did you break from that into mathematics?. Can you expand on that?
My email is in my profile if you'd prefer to tell me more about this offline.
from my own (limited!) understanding the first recorded instances of what we would now call combinatorics was Sanskrit linguistics. I don't have a reference handy but theres been a fair amount of historical scholarly work on this.
Given that people who memorize sanskrit hymns typically come from a single caste (with limited intermarriage between castes), the control should just include the members of that caste (but who don't memorize hymns) - to account for genetic effects. And as another commenter pointed out, this doesn't prove anything about Sanksrit. To prove something like that, the authors should have compared brain sizes with people who memorize other non-sanskrit texts.
"Earlier studies of the brain of the cabbie had already noted the increase in "grey matter" in the hippocampus, an area found at the base of the brain."
A substantial group that memorizes a foreign-language (to many) text are Muslim huffaz, who commit the entire Koran to memory. They'd make a good comparison group, given their large numbers, ethnic heterogeneity and worldwide distribution.
Does it? A machine can indeed do a better job (in the sense of requiring negligible training) of knowing all the streets and democratized “the knowledge” which previously was the purview of a small guild.
I am sorry for their sunk cost, but really minicabs+gps and now uber/Lyft et al are as good, or would be if taxis didn’t have a pick up monopoly.
From previous articles on "the knowledge" I believe that no, a machine cannot really do "better" or not yet, at least.
IIRC at the exam you could get questions like "The passenger tells you that his cousin mentioned a building with a bas-relief of Holy Mary holding Jesus, it was right around the angle from his hotel, but he does not remember the hotel's name".
You are supposed to know the place and the best way to get there, based on just this (also, a good number of "knowledgeable" taxi drivers go for an official London Tour Guide exam soon after, with relatively little effort, considering they have already memorized thousands of places, monuments and architectural details).
I may concede that it can perform “adequately at a lower price point” (I use Google myself when I am not in my hometown), but the parent wasn’t talking about price.
I went off the phrase "A machine can indeed do a better job [..]" and was seeing the price as a big part of that package.
Looks we agree about everything that we actually made explicit. The disagreement was about the implicit meaning of whether price was included in the meaning of 'better job'.
The Knowledge has a very important secondary effect - it creates a huge sunk cost, vastly increasing the downside of losing your license. Getting a green badge takes three to four years of full-time study. You can lose it for relatively minor offences like short-changing a passenger or taking a tourist on the scenic route. Hackney cab drivers with a green badge have a far stronger incentive to do business honestly than a minicab or Uber driver.
>> Does it? A machine can indeed do a better job (in the sense of requiring negligible training) of knowing all the streets and democratized “the knowledge” which previously was the purview of a small guild.
A theoretical machine could do a better job. In practice, we can't build anything that can reason about routes anywhere near as well as London cabbies do. And I'd say that even without knowing about The Knowledge.
Pamar's comment above has a very good example of the kind of thing "a machine" is still very, very far from achieving.
People can learn, of course. I'm just saying that a an ever changing score of Uber drivers will not be comparable to drivers with "the Knowledge". Any other claim feels preposterous to me.
This can of course be replicated with a computer, but a simple GPS is not going to cut it. Advanced machine learning, voice recognition like nothing I have ever seen, very good A.I. to resolve misunderstandings about where tourists and other non frequent travellers might really want to go instead of where they actually said. And so on and so on. We can get there. An underpaid, recently started and soon to be replaced, stressed uber driver in his uncles car armed with a GPS app is just not going to cut it. Yet.
When I was young I had a chance to meet two very young huffaz (we say hafız) candidate. They were probably around 10 to 12 years old. What fascinating was, they did not know any Arabic and memorize almost more than a full page a day continuously. I remember them as very calm and nice kids. Also for the context, there are around 77.000 words in Koran.
While it's traditionally the Brahmin caste that memorizes Vedic hymns, there's plenty of genetic diversity even within the caste, which is spread across 10s of millions of people in very different parts of India.
May be, but there might be enough differences between castes as opposed to within a caste. The control should be as close to the experimental group as possible. Finding a control group from the same caste is inexpensive.
This is precisely what I was thinking. Something interesting that I hadn't thought of before is that we now actually live in a time where genome sequencing has become cheap enough that low-N studies (like those in MRI/fMRI-based studies) can actually begin to participant-match based on genetic background. This might become the new gold standard!
Sequencing might become cheap enough to do that, but our understanding of the functions of the different genes is so lacking that I don't think a lot of meaningful data can be extracted for most studies' subjects.
I don't think we necessarily need to know the function of the genes in order to create a participant matching paradigm that is better than what is being employed currently. For example we can get a more precise snapshot of ancestry using sequencing than simply relying on self-reported 'race'. Also I don't think it needs to be a perfect match; simply stating that controls matched case participants within X percent ancestry would be a useful statistic to report in the methods.
since the book 'battle for sanskrit' by rajiv malhotra came out more hindus are now aware of efforts by various groups to denigrate sanskrit as an 'oppressive' language used to control the masses
this is funny because the British actually did that exactly with imposition of english education to create the obedient clerk class for their colony, and claimed it was in fact liberation
and then the germans claimed sanskrit was theirs and could not possibly be of indian local origin and nazi-fied the 'aryan' language
and of course no european scholar could countenance the possibility of hindu epics like the ramayana and mahabharata let alone the vedas could be older than the homeric epics of greek civilization and conveniently 'dated' all indian history to preserve their superiority
The article is about “India's Vedic Sanskrit pandits [who] train for years”. For anyone who wants a glimpse of what this training (or the result of the training) looks like, there are some great videos on YouTube:
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALEHkgOx8EE “Embodying the Vedas - A day in the Śrī Kṛṣṇayajurveda Pāṭhaśālā” (The article mentions the closely related Shukla Yajurveda.) (Examples of the training are from 00:00 to 00:55, from 04:59 to 05:35, from 08:00 to 09:08, from 11:15 to 13:40.)
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruuPbvViOe4 “Glimpses of the current status of Vedic tradition in Kerala” (Examples of the training are from 00:00 to 03:44, from 08:45 to 12:57, from 13:15 to 14:46)
If you look at the age at which students start, theories like “people with strong verbal memories will choose to memorize mantras” (proposed in another comment) are easy to discard. Of course, other statistical effects are still possible, such as selection bias (people who do not have or develop the needed memory may abandon training, etc).
I just recently learned that Sanskrit was the first language to have its grammar formally specified. Pāṇini in the 4th century BCE wrote down the complete one. I couldn't find a good translation of it online. I suppose translating a grammar written in the language itself is tough.
I was curious because I want to know how much of BNF grammar functionality is represented in it. Perhaps BNF is just a rediscovering/reformatting of the Sanskrit grammar?
> I just recently learned that Sanskrit was the first language to have its grammar formally specified. Pāṇini in the 4th century BCE wrote down the complete one.
People can say this, but that won't make it true. There are unexaggerated 100% odds that what Pāṇini specified was not a complete description of the speech of his time or any other point in history, just as no complete description of any modern language exists today. It's not for lack of scholastic effort; the idea of completely specifying a human language isn't even well defined.
> I want to know how much of BNF grammar functionality is represented in it. Perhaps BNF is just a rediscovering/reformatting of the Sanskrit grammar?
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003GUBIJ8/ describes the style in which Pāṇini's rules are written. (I'm not saying this is the best source to answer that question, just that it's a book I've read and its description is probably enough for your purposes.)
> There are unexaggerated 100% odds that what Pāṇini specified was not a complete description of the speech of his time or any other point in history
That is an odd claim to make because Sanskrit was not a language of day to day speech. Those would be the vernaculars of the time. Sanskrit was very much a crafted language used for much more formal purposes.
> That is an odd claim to make because Sanskrit was not a language of day to day speech.
This is what many folk in Universities want us to believe, but having seen day-to-day language used and taught, I don't think it is, or was ever true. Apparently even the devadasis knew it extremely well back in the day, much as did people from many other 'backward' 'castes'.
It's almost as if a school of people want the tradition dead, because its staying alive is too... erm... worrying ? Lots of complicated power structures hang in the balance, as India's tortuously chooses between its past and the past its master want it to have / have had.
> By the way, knowing a language is very different from use in day to day speech.
I know the difference. Have you ever visited Sanskrit universities/gurukulas in India ? It's simply magical. Sanskrit is taught in the language itself, and students chat with their teachers and amongst themselves in the language. This made me very happy!
This is even acknowledged on various Indology mailing lists, where the western scholars note this, often rather bitterly, often peppering the immediately following sentence with generic insults and racist disdain.
Apologies for getting political here, but I've never understood why the field is so hostile to India (British origins ?). East Asia departments by comparison are filled with Sinophiles/Japanophiles.
Thanks for the video, where is the claim that Sanskrit was a language for day to day speech made. A paper makes it easier than a video.
> I know the difference. Have you ever visited Sanskrit universities/gurukulas in India ?
A personal magical experience has little to do with the fact in contention here -- was Sanskrit a language for day to day conversation among the commons.
Very little in your comment speaks to that claim, nothing in fact, except may be some part of the video. Whether Sanskrit can be picked up as a spoken language by motivated people is not the point of contention. I can point you to many communities that speak in a language that was never used as a language of day to day speech by the commons.
On whether I have visited a Sanskrit university -- Does having a close family member as a Prof in Sanskrit count ?
I'm sure if one were inclined, one could find more material.
> Whether Sanskrit can be picked up as a spoken language by motivated people is not the point of contention. I can point you to many communities that speak in a language that was never used as a language of day to day speech by the commons.
Fair enough. That said, what kind of evidence would 'prove'
the said proposition ? Is there evidence to the contrary which would fit this standard ?
Latin for instance, may not have been spoken in its classical form, but the vulgar form is believed to have been widely spoken.
Similarly, if someone were given freedom to ontologically ground my words (say, 'common' == '> 1e4, of various diversities'; 'sanskrit' == 'paninian grammar'), merely to prove me wrong, the game is not worth playing (which circles back to my first point).
Non English publication would be fine. Its the review process that matters.
I have no problems believing that a colloquial form of Sanskrit was spoken, that would be the very definition of a vernacular. A situation not different from the Latin example you gave.
Records of a direct quote of a protagonist who is commoner, in literature or preferably in royal records etc would be acceptable evidence. Otherwise how can one differentiate it from claims that humans rode dinosaurs with wings.
BTW I don't disagree with you when you state there is a bias against such subject matter (you can look up the issue of Taylor's expansion of trigonometric functions by the Kerala school of mathematicians much before Newton). The way to address this would be do counter that with proper research results and processes.
Thanks for the book recommendation. Too bad the reviews of the electronic version are terrible (apparently terribly scanned/converted, not content issues).
Panini's grammar is closest to an instance of a Post canonical system. It is basically a set of general rewriting rules, with features going beyond BNF in power.
This is for pretty much the same reason that the grammatical formalisms modern linguists use also go beyond BNF. Linguists are interested in issues of grammaticality that actually do need context (such as subject-verb agreement) and so obviously context-free grammars can't do the whole job!
(For a programming example, you can see type correctness as a case of how well-formedness of programs depends on context -- whether a variable can be used in an expression depends on its type.)
Panini covered both the grammar in the regular sense as well as the phonology of the language. "Optimality theory" attempts to model phonology as a collection of violable constraints operating with a least violation principle. It is supposed to be more generally applicable to what we normally know as grammar (dealings at the words/phrases level), but has seen most success with phonology.
Generally people don’t approach panini vyakaran directly but rather through a text such as the siddhanta kaumudi or laghu siddhanta kaumudi which are the panini sutras reordered with the ancient commentaries of patanjali and katyayan.
As someone who read some of these scriptures mentioned here , they are always cited from memory. When we were taught , it is usually the teacher reciting once and the students reciting again with 2 repeats. Usually it starts with one word at a time , then by joining 2 together , then entire sentences and then entire chapters.An example here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCO1FIQzbQk)
It is quite incidental that , many of these stick in memory quite a lot. When i chant these after a few years , i am quite surprised that i can recall this without much effort.
P.S. Not glorifying, just stating the facts
Hmm, interesting observation, but the causal link seems a bit tenuous.
Is it possible that only people with larger hippcampi and other cortical regions are good at memorizing large texts? (that is, the causal link is inverted)
Is it possible that people who learn or do something focussedly over a long stretch of time (practice music 4 hours a day) show larger development over those same areas than the average distracted person?
>Is it possible that people who learn or do something focussedly over a long stretch of time (practice music 4 hours a day) show larger development over those same areas than the average distracted person?
It's more than possible -- it's well-documented with some kinds of meditative practice. [1]
The only interesting question this article raises for a knowledgeable person is whether or not the Sanskrit language _itself_ would have an effect on cognition, but it never succeeds to prove it would or offer a mechanism for how it would work, and instead asks for funds for more studies.
> Does the pandits’ substantial increase in the gray matter of critical verbal memory organs mean they are less prone to devastating memory pathologies such as Alzheimer's? We don't know yet, though anecdotal reports from India's Ayurvedic doctors suggest this may be the case.
If there is such an association, self-selection bias must be accounted for. It might be that dementia risk factors or subclinical pre-dementia pathology makes a person less likely to pursue training as a pandit.
Also, anecdotal reports from Ayurvedic doctors suggest a lot of things. For example, that the right sort of yoga practice leads to 80-year-olds who look and feel like teenagers.
I don't think the children involved in the training have a great deal of choice in the matter. Most priests then start their career almost immediately as adults.
while this is interesting, it would be good to know if the memorizing of other texts - say, the works of Shakespeare, or Encyclopedia britannica, would have a similar effect. It is perhaps not the mantras, but the act of memorization perhaps?
Strong oral traditions still exist, or did until recently, in the Balkans around their lengthy epics and wedding hymns. There may be some traditions in northern Europe clinging on for dear life as well. In the classical tradition, it was a hallmark of leaning to memorize long blocks if not whole works of Homer, Vergil, and various Elegiac poets.
Part of the problem in teasing out the effect is that there is an inherent selection bias in the type of people who receive this type of education (or any education, in the not too distant past) to conclude from population analyses to what degree the particular task of literary memorization confers this benefit. Someone's going to have to ferret out the mechanism or do controlled longitudinal studies, which will be costly and fraught with difficulty. Even Socrates (i.e. Plato) was attuned to the idea that memory was under attack with the advent of writing[0] and a culture that has other information retrieval technology, so it's debatable whether we could really plumb the depths of what human cognition could be under different pressures. It's also unclear how early this kind of training has to be started too in order to have an effect.
In a pre-literate society these kinds of works (including much of Shakespeare) would've been composed in verse form to aid with memorization. So if you intend to recite from memory for six hours straight, like in the article, you probably want that rather than Britannica or the phone book.
I do find it plausible that certain (combinations of) language and verse metre might have mantra-like qualities, conducive to achieving trance states that could affect the brain. India has been on the case for a looong time, so it wouldn't surprise if Sanskrit + Vedic poetry present a particularly sophisticated example.
The Sanskrit Effect is result of repeating specific mantra words that occur in the text.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3099099/
It will be much easier just to chant the specific "brainy" mantras(such as brim/aim) instead of hours of random text.
>Although this initial research, focused on intergroup comparison of brain structure, could not directly address the Sanskrit effect question (that requires detailed functional studies with cross-language memorization comparisons, for which we are currently seeking funding), we found something specific about intensive verbal memory training.
This quote, coupled with a lack of a proposed mechanism as to how the Sanskrit language would itself have an influence on cognition, means that as far as we know right now there is no such thing as the Sanskrit Effect.
It makes for a catchy headline, though, and the other stuff in the article speaks to my own successful experiments in memory training -- if interested, look up the books from the World Memory Championship winner.
Funny, I just read Andre Weils biography, and one thing that stood out about it was that he spent a lot of time learning sanskrit. I wonder if there's a connection between this and his massive intellect.
From the article
"Our study was a first foray into imaging the brains of professionally trained Sanskrit pandits in India. Although this initial research, focused on intergroup comparison of brain structure, could not directly address the Sanskrit effect question (that requires detailed functional studies with cross-language memorization comparisons, for which we are currently seeking funding),"
Is it just me who thinks that this disclaimer negate whole point of research ?
I too don't think a language by itself don't have a certain effect on brain development. But Brahmins (who study vedas in India) starting learning Vedas at about 4 years of age, if am not wrong, chanting it daily morning from 4.am for couple of hours. That would definitely have an impact on your brain. Remember the study which showed London taxi drivers had bigger brains?
Does anyone have recommendations for a good Sanskrit book for the self-learner? Years ago I tried Coulson's "Teach Yourself Sanskrit" but found it too dense, and more recently have been considering Ruppel's "The Cambridge Introduction to Sanskrit" ?
The best book I've found for self-study is the two-volume set by Thomas Egenes (Introduction to Sanskrit). It's very gently paced, though, so you need to have the motivation to stick through till the end (about 400 pages in Part 1 and about 450 in Part 2).
Brahminical training starts when one is a kid, so choice doesn't come into play. I was exposed to it when I was 15 years old, and I still didn't have a choice. FML.
I'd like to see a similar study of people who remember hundreds of prime digits.
Another interesting note is that Vedic mantras are sometimes traditionally learnt and recited in what is known as a Ghana patha. If i were to number the words in a sentence, “The cow jumped over the moon” as 1 2 3 4 5 6 and then if I were to recite the sentence now permuting the words as 1 2 2 1 1 2 3 3 2 1 1 2 3,, 2 3 3 2 2 3 4 4 3 2 2 3 4.... The complexity increases. This is because words can be joined together in Sanskrit. Furthermore each letter in Vedic Sanskrit has three ways of pronouncing it (similar to the Chinese four accents) and these can change as you permute and apply the sandhi rules as well.
I haven’t seen such complexity in other languages (though it’s possible it may exist) but such complexity is why it wouldn’t surprise me that the effect could possibly be specific to Sanskrit.