Logic List Mailing Archive

Frits Staal (1930-2012)

The eminent Indologist and Sanskrit scholar Frits Staal passed away on 
February 19 at his retirement home in Thailand. 'The Hindu' newspaper 
writes:

''Staal argued that ancient Indian grammarians, especially Panini, had 
completely mastered methods of linguistic theory not discovered again 
until the 1950s. The Indians had thought about it long before modern 
mathematical logic was applied to linguistics by Noam Chomsky.

The early methods allowed the construction of discrete, potentially 
infinite generative systems, experts maintain. The formal basis for 
Panini's methods involves the use of auxiliary markers, rediscovered in 
the 1930s by logician Emil Post, whose rewrite systems are currently a 
standard approach for description of computer languages, experts say.

Staal wrote, 'Panini is the Indian Euclid.' The Indologist describes how 
Panini had expanded the spoken Sanskrit to a formal metalanguage."

The complete piece is at 
http://www.thehindu.com/news/states/kerala/article2913333.ece

Among Frits' many publications, examples of possible interest to FOM 
readers include 'The concept of metalanguage and its Indian background', 
J. Indian Phil., 1975 3(3), pp. 315-354; and 'The Sanskrit of science,' J. 
Indian Phil., 1995, 23 (1), pp. 73-127. Among his several distinguished 
academic positions, Frits was a long-time faculty member of UC Berkeley's 
Group in Logic and the Methodology of Science, created by Alfred Tarski.

John Kadvany