Vedic Sanskrit: The Computer Language of Vedic Period

Introduction

“If a language has many meanings for a word, it is ambiguous, but when Sanskrit has many meanings for a word, it is rich!” says Dr. Ramanujan. He had headed a project on ‘Computational Rendering of Paninian Grammar.’

The word “Sanskrit” means “language brought to formal perfection” in contrast to the common languages, or “natural” languages. Vedic Sanskrit is the spoken and written language of the ancient Vedic civilization in large parts of Asia during the great Vedic age. It is also called the language of Aryans. Sanskrit words might sound complex but they are similar to words of many languages.

Vedic Sanskrit is an ancient language of the Indo-Aryan subgroup. People who study languages say that it is more perfect than Greek and Latin. Vedic Sanskrit has a very rich and continuous history of nearly five thousand years. According to linguists and historians, the most ancient language is Sanskrit. Therefore, Sanskrit is the mother of all languages. The computer language distinguishes languages while studying them, on two levels. Namely, the word level and the sentence level. The word-level deals with the total amount of information present in separate words. It does this irrespective of where and how they have put in. The latter deals with words that give information on the basis of the syntactical aspects, like their position in the sentence.

Vedic Sanskrit and the Computer Language

English requires the syntactic pattern for getting the maximum information possible. But languages like Latin, Greek, and Vedic Sanskrit demand the word level approach. As it is more suitable than the other. Since they have a highly detailed structure, where the syntactic elements are included as part of the words themselves, through conjugational suffixes. Sanskrit consists of the largest structural details and is the best for computer programs of such classical languages. These programs consist of pattern recognition, sharp and clear recognition of significant patterns of words. ‘Sandhi’ one of the phenomenons of Vedic Sanskrit, makes the task more complicated; the computer language must know these rules. Then only it can interpret properly. Therefore, we can say that Sanskrit, a language, of the Vedic period is complex even for the computer language.

Vedic Sanskrit is called the universal language. The Karaka system in Sanskrit grammar makes it possible to translate Sanskrit into any other language. A sentence in any language can be first transformed into the Sanskrit pattern, and then translated into any other language. The universal nature of the karaka system helps Sanskrit to play an important role in modem programs using the computer.

Conclusion

The richness of Sanskrit comes from the fact that everything is pre-determined. Everything is derivable in Vedic Sanskrit just like on the computer language. “There is a derivational process, and so there is no ambiguity. You can explain everything structurally. There is a base meaning, a suffix meaning, and a combination meaning. The base is the constant part, and the suffix is the variable part. The variables are most potent. With suffixes, one can highlight, modify or attenuate.” You can frame new Sanskrit words every time you want to.

Furthermore, computer language is said to be derived from Vedic Sanskrit. It is as complex, but at the same time as useful once decoded. Anything and everything can be derived. Also, all the languages are said to have originated from Vedic Sanskrit itself. As historians have found that Sanskrit is the earliest language. Although, no proper proof has been put forward to support this fact.

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