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How Formal Concept Lattices Solve a Problem of Ancient Linguistics

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Conceptual Structures: Common Semantics for Sharing Knowledge (ICCS 2005)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 3596))

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Abstract

In his grammar of ancient Sanskrit, Pāṅini represents the phonological classes as intervals of a list. This representation method and especially the actual list constructed by Pāṅini, which is called the Śivasū tras, earns universal admiration. The legend says that god Śiva revealed the Śivasū tras to Pāṅini in order to let him start developing his grammar of Sanskrit. A question still discussed is whether it is possible to shorten the Śivasū tras. In the course of this paper, I am going to prove that this question can be reduced to a question about the graph-theoretical form of a particular formal concept lattice. Furthermore, I show how the Śivasū tras can be reconstructed from Pāṅini’s grammar.

Thanks to James Kilbury for providing me with the subject of this paper as a nice riddle.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Language and Information, Department of Computational Linguistics, University of Düsseldorf,  

    Wiebke Petersen

Authors
  1. Wiebke Petersen
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Information Systems and Technology, University of Wollongong, Northfields Ave, NSW 2522, Wollongong, Australia

    Frithjof Dau

  2. RCR, LIRMM, UMII, CNRS,  

    Marie-Laure Mugnier

  3. Research Center L3S, Appelstr. 9a, D-30167, Hannover, Germany

    Gerd Stumme

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© 2005 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Petersen, W. (2005). How Formal Concept Lattices Solve a Problem of Ancient Linguistics. In: Dau, F., Mugnier, ML., Stumme, G. (eds) Conceptual Structures: Common Semantics for Sharing Knowledge. ICCS 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 3596. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11524564_23

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11524564_23

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-27783-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-31885-9

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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