Many people have heard of the “Aryan Invasion Theory” according to which the Vedic civilization is not native to India, but was created by invaders who came from other parts of the world into ancient India. Factually, whether the Vedic texts were authored by natives or invaders should not matter if they are true. The proof of truth should be the...
There is much confusion regarding the importance of Sanskrit at present. Some people treat Sanskrit as the origin of multiple languages, particularly those that are spoken in India. Others have talked about the key role that Sanskrit can play in Artificial Intelligence. And yet other people are talking about the precise and sophisticated system of rule-based grammar formulated by Pāṇini, quite...
All over Vedic texts, the world is described as “sound” or “text”. The source of this world is stated to be the original meaning, called “knowledge”. This original meaning then expands to create various other types of meanings, which are all partial knowledge. The Mīmāṃsā system of philosophy gives this doctrine a name–Arthavāda–or the doctrine of meaning. I often use the...
There are many words in Sanskrit that do not have direct equivalents in other languages. Ardent supporters of Sanskrit, therefore, makes two controversial claims. First, that any translation into another language must distort the meaning. Second, to preserve the meaning we must either introduce the same words into the lingua franca of that language, or we must continue to study the...
Exegesis, according to Wikipedia, is “a critical explanation or interpretation of a text, particularly a religious text”. In the Vedic tradition, it exists as the commentaries by previous āchāryās who have explained the scriptures in various ways according to time, place, and circumstances. Such commentaries are essential for one key reason—the meanings of the words are continually evolving with time, and if...
In earlier posts—such as here—I described the notion of space in which words are identical to their meanings, and connected it to a tree-like structure of space. In the last post, I described how this tree-like structure of space appears in all languages in trying to decode their meanings. In this post, I will briefly discuss the empirical evidence that supports...
Since the 1960s, when computers first appeared, a machine that can think just like humans was claimed to be just a few years away. This idea has been called Artificial Intelligence (AI) and it reappears every few years in a new form, the latest being the brouhaha around “Machine Learning”, “Deep Learning”, etc. The algorithms and techniques underlying these trends have...
