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'It's good coding': Computer science students drawn to classes on Sanskrit, a 3,500-year-old language

Temple wall in Cambodia with religious text engraved in sanskrit
Sanskrit inscriptions are found on the walls of Banteay Srey, a 10th-century temple in Cambodia (Konstik via Getty Images)

Libbie Mills, an assistant professor in the department for the study of religion in the University of Toronto鈥檚 Faculty of Arts & Science, noticed something interesting this fall in her introductory Sanskrit class: computer science students.

 

The course typically attracts students majoring in the study of religion, who are learning the language to further their research into Hinduism, Buddhism and Sikhism. Reading through her class list, however, Mills found that of six of the 40 enrolled students were actually computer science majors. 

鈥淚'm always excited when there are students from an unexpected place,鈥 she says. 

The lingual connection between Sanskrit and computer science, it turns out, has been the subject of interest for quite some time. The first well-known publication that examined the relationship was in 1985, when NASA scientist Rick Briggs published a research paper in which he argued that the 3,500-year-old language was the best candidate for programming artificial intelligence technology 鈥 namely because of its adherence to rigid grammatical rules. 

Paul Thomas, a fourth-year undergraduate student at St. Michael鈥檚 College who plans on majoring in computer science next year, says he has a proclivity for learning languages, but ultimately took the course because of its connection to coding.

鈥淪anskrit is a very computational language,鈥 he explains. 鈥淚t鈥檚 a lot of syntax, which is the structure of programming itself. Classical Sanskrit is an engineered language.鈥

There are nearly 4,000 rules recorded in the fourth century BCE grammar of P膩峁噄ni, an ancient scholar of the language 鈥 and Mill鈥檚 approach to teaching it is methodical.

鈥淚'm a nerd鈥 she says. 鈥淚 like mathy type things, and I teach in a bit of a sciencey way.鈥

She stresses to her students that this is not a typical language class, where after a few classes they鈥檒l be able to casually practise what they have learned over coffee. 

鈥淚t鈥檚 not conversational, there鈥檚 too much to learn at the beginning,鈥 she says. 鈥淭hey must learn the characters and how words get put together. It鈥檚 mind-bogglingly awful at first.鈥 

She starts with what she calls the building blocks 鈥 鈥渢he order of sounds we produce out of our mouths ... from the throat to palate to teeth to lips鈥 鈥 and enthuses over the 鈥渢idiness of the language鈥, where a few root words are the basis of the entire Sanskrit vocabulary.

鈥淚t's orderly,鈥 Mills says. 鈥淚f you know the systems for making words you can work backward to the root to understand the meaning of the word. It鈥檚 creative in an organized way. It is kind of amazing.鈥

Mills adds that she understands the affinity that computer programmers have with the language. 鈥淚t鈥檚 good coding,鈥 she says. 

For Thomas, the strict grammatical rules of Sanskrit align well with the goals of computer programmers who are ultimately interested in the 鈥渜uestion of how to create interface between computers and human languages.鈥  He maintains that Sanskrit is well positioned to do so because of its algorithmic foundation. 鈥淐omputers don鈥檛 understand linguistics, they understand rules,鈥 he says.  

In addition, the rigidity of Sanskrit makes it less likely that an artificial intelligence algorithm would misinterpret commands. The same can鈥檛 be said of a language like English, which is looser with its rules and where words have multiple meanings.

鈥淚n English, there are so many influences from different language streams,鈥 Mills says. 鈥淚t鈥檚 kind of a mess.鈥 

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