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From Pāṇinian Sandhi to Finite State Calculus

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 5402))

Abstract

The most authoritative description of the morphophonemic rules that apply at word boundaries (external sandhi) in Sanskrit is by the great grammarian Pāṇini (fl. 5th c. b. c. e.). These rules are stated formally in Pāṇini’s grammar, the Aṣṭ ādhyāyī ‘group of eight chapters’. The present paper summarizes Pāṇini’s handling of sandhi, his notational conventions, and formal properties of his theory. An XML vocabulary for expressing Pāṇini’s rules is introduced and the application to morphophonemic rules demonstrated. Although Pāṇini’s notation potentially exceeds a finite state grammar in power, individual rules do not rewrite their own output, and thus they may be automatically translated into a rule cascade from which a finite state transducer can be compiled.

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Hyman, M.D. (2009). From Pāṇinian Sandhi to Finite State Calculus. In: Huet, G., Kulkarni, A., Scharf, P. (eds) Sanskrit Computational Linguistics. ISCLS ISCLS 2007 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 5402. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-00155-0_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-00155-0_10

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-00154-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-00155-0

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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