I received a message from a publicist this week. The name caught my eye because I knew the scholar from Cambridge years ago. The subject of the email was simple: a new book on Pāṇini and the old claim that something in his system “doesn’t work.”
For two and a half millennia, scholars have argued that Pāṇini’s grammar, the first true computational system for language, contains a flaw. His treatise gives a compact system for generating correct Sanskrit forms. But in cases where two rules seem to apply at the same time, most readers assumed the system breaks. Textbooks describe this as a “conflict problem.” Generations of commentators tried to patch it with exceptions, hierarchies, or interpretive workarounds.
The new book, Pāṇini’s Perfect Rule (December 2025), argues that the flaw was never there. The author, Rishi Rajpopat, claims the system already contains a rule for solving the conflict. According to him, Pāṇini didn’t leave a hole; modern readers simply looked in the wrong place. If his reading is right, the entire architecture of the grammar becomes visible as a single machine; elegant, compact, and self-consistent.
There are two parts to this story. Continue reading Pāṇini, the “Glitch,” and a Note From an Old Cambridge Friend
