This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: When Siddhartha Jayanti sat down to write the first computer science paper in Telugu, an Indian language with approximately 100 million speakers, he realized he first had to solve a problem that had little to do with computing. He had to find the words.
His research examined how groups of computer processors work together by analyzing what each processor knows and how they communicate. Jayanti showed that there are fundamental mathematical limits on how quickly multiple processor cores can safely coordinate and share common data by analyzing how information flows between them. But there was no established vocabulary in Telugu, Jayanti's native language, for technical terminology such as "shared-memory multiprocessor" that he needed to effectively communicate his results.
He resolved to find a way nonetheless, successfully writing a Telugu-language chapter in his Ph.D. dissertation that later won the 2023 ACM Principles of Distributed Computing Doctoral Dissertation Award. The main results were translated into English for reviewers, and the chapter was published in 2022 on arXiv, an open-access archive of research papers, becoming the first research paper in modern computer science written in an Indian language. Now an assistant professor of computer science at Dartmouth, Jayanti, in a paper published this year on arXiv, describes how he overcame the challenge of developing technical vocabulary for advanced computer science concepts by deriving and coining new words through Sanskrit, also known as Samskrtam, a classical Indian language that has had an extensive influence on Telugu.
With more than 1.47 billion people, India is now the world's most populous country and is home to dozens of languages. Telugu is one of 22 official languages recognized by the Government of India. "When you can derive terms natively, they mean things to people.
They can relate them to other words, and they can understand them both linguistically and scientifically," says Jayanti, who learned both Telugu and Sanskrit as a boy and was particularly interested in reading and writing poetry in both languages. It has also been an enduring practice across Indian languages to take words from classical languages such as Sanskrit and make them their own through minor alterations of word endings or sound substitutions, he says. "This means that you can create a common vocabulary across a slew of Indian languages all at once." In his recent paper, Jayanti explains how he derived words through simple examples such as "asynchronous," which is used technically in the field of distributed computing to indicate that different computers or processors do their work independently without waiting for other systems to stay in sync.
He derived the Sanskrit term asamakālika from a- (not), sama (same) and kāla (time), which he then adapted to asamakālikamu in Telugu, in keeping with the grammatical rules of the language. "Incidentally, the English term 'asynchronous' also comes from a combination of the Greek morphemes a- (not), syn- (together) and khronos (time)," Jayanti notes in his paper. Discover the latest in science, tech, and space with over 100,000 subscribers who rely on Phys.org for daily insights. d research that matter—daily or weekly.
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