[INDOLOGY] sanskrit and computers?

[rajam]

I’d rather approach the problem/task at hand from a different perspective — that is … what computer language is suitable for describing/analyzing a human language. I have had exposure to human languages and computer languages, so I say this with confidence.  

Thanks and regards,
V.S.Rajam

> On Apr 17, 2020, at 9:01 AM, Jean-Luc Chevillard via INDOLOGY <indology at list.indology.info> wrote:
> 
> Dear Patrick,
> 
> I suspect that answering your question is a tall order.
> 
> (A) On the one hand, you would need feedback from people who have FIRST-HAND experience in the writing of grammars at the time of the 1st millenium BC
> 
> (B) On the other hand, you would need feedback from people who have FIRST-HAND experience in the writing of compilers in the 1960-s
> 
> And these people would have to be in direct contact, or IDEALLY, to be the same people.
> ;-)
> 
> Regarding point (B), the pointer given by Dominik this morning, as a followup to Harry Spier's reminder, was the starting point of a chain continued for instance by
> https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/355588.365140
> which I remember reading, when going through D.E.Knuth's collection of articles, and also when trying, in recent years, to imagine how it was to use a computer, at the heroic time when people were inventing languages like "ALGOL 60" and were trying to write compilers for them,
> which was not easy ....
> 
> Regarding point (A), the requirement brought to my mind the "déclic" I had felt when I read, long ago, the expression "le regard critique d'un rédacteur de grammaire" inside the following sentence, written by my EPHE colleague Georges-Jean Pinault, on p.338, inside a section of his contribution to the collective volume /Histoire des Idées Linguistiques, Tome 1/ [Sylvain Auroux (ed.), Mardaga (pub.), 1989 (ISBN 2-87009-389-6)]
> 
> « Parmi les premiers commentateurs, seul Kātyāyana pose des questions sur l'organisation générale de l'/Aṣṭādhyāyī/, qu'il considère avec le regard critique d'un rédacteur de grammaire »
> 
> 
> Therefore, I would like to suggest to you to try YOURSELF your hand on those two types of tasks (the writing of compilers and the writing of grammars) if you want to get an insider's EMPATHIC view of the reason which led someone to write that it was not enough to replace "Backus Normal Form" by "Backus Naur Form" as the oralized form of BNF (as Knuth had successfully suggested) but that one should go one step further and introduce the name of Pāṇini ...
> :-)
> 
> Good luck
> 
> அன்புடன்
> 
> -- Jean-Luc (in Müssen, Germany)
> 
> https://twitter.com/JLC1956
> 
> 
> https://tst.hypotheses.org/author/jlch
> 
> https://www.google.de/maps/@53.49484,10.57238,19z
> 
> 
> 
> On 12/04/2020 11:25, patrick mccartney via INDOLOGY wrote:
>> I'm not, necessarily, curious about the intricacies of using technology to understand Sanskrit's grammar or digitize the humanities, but, rather, the aspiration to apply it to other machine learning/AI projects that compete with other conlangs specific to the task of coding. However, what I'm ultimately looking for is cogent discussion of the sociological side of this phenomenon, if it exists.
> 
> 
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