Tea at Trianon: Ancient Sanskrit Text Algorithm

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, December 31, 2022

Ancient Sanskrit Text Algorithm

From Big Think:

Although the Indian subcontinent has produced many writing systems — historian S t even Roger Fischer calls it “the world’s richest treasury of scripts” — it also maintains a strong oral tradition. The Brahmins, India’s priestly class, long considered speech superior to writing. Even centuries after the Indians adopted writing, the Brahmins continued to pass down the hymns of the Vedas, Hinduism’s oldest four sacred texts, orally.
This tradition meant the desire to use language correctly wasn’t simply a matter of avoiding an embarrassing correction in the comments section. It was of the utmost religious consequence. With the Aṣṭādhyāyī, Pāṇini didn’t only want to teach the language. He aimed to protect Hinduism’s sacred texts from corruption. He built a system of operations that allowed a reader to combine base words and affixes to generate proper word forms. The user could then combine those words to construct impeccable sentences. All readers had to do was follow the instructions. (Read more.)