Panin's Numerics

[chrisstavrous]

In a conversation with a christian last night I was confronted with Ivan Panin's mathematical formula called Panin's numerics. He tells me that a russian mathematician found a mathematical code throughout the bible. This christian assured me that this code is proof that the bible has been written by a higher being (god) because the probability of a human being writing such a mathematical formula into the bible text would be impossible. So I looked this information up online and instantly I found web page after web page of MATHEMATICAL PROOF OF THE BIBLE.

 

Here is one site I believe gave a opened opinion on the subject.

 

http://www.cai.org/faq/bible-mathematics

 

So I would like to hear your thoughts about this subject, did any of you get exposed to this when you were a christian.

[WarriorPoet]

Gestation period for a cow:  285 days

Gestation period for a lion:  110 days

Gestation period for a hamster:  22 days

Gestation period for a cheetah:  93 days

Gestation period for a sheep:  145 days

 

None of these creatures have a gestation that is divisible by 7.  How does the data mining author explain these?

[Voice]

I have an uncle who looked into this extensively. Numerology is what he called it. I used to think it was really cool, but now days I'm more interested in numbers that help explain day-to-day things and help us understand the real world and ourselves. When you start thinking on numerology, it becomes a vortex that sucks you in. Have you seen the movie, Pi?

[Storm]

The biggest issue I see in all of this is that our bible ultimately has been passed down through generations of scribes and what's to say that a group of them didn't sit down and simply decide to make it be numerically interesting? and what if a fellow group of scribes thought it to be cool and they kept it and therefore all this interesting numerical stuff just got passed down through the ages to what we have now? Why does this always have to be attributed to god? Does anyone inside the xtian community think this might be a possibility?

[ExCBooster]

Gestation period for a cow:  285 days

Gestation period for a lion:  110 days

Gestation period for a hamster:  22 days

Gestation period for a cheetah:  93 days

Gestation period for a sheep:  145 days

 

None of these creatures have a gestation that is divisible by 7.  How does the data mining author explain these?

Wow. Your comment piqued my curiosity, and I checked it out. Data mining, indeed. The whole BS about insects was laughable, since they have a variable time to hatching, depending on the temperature. (I've got a crisper-drawer in the fridge full of silkworm eggs, as we speak. They've been in there since high Summer, and they'll probably keep until Spring.) What kills me is that this isn't really esoteric knowledge... CSI is a pretty popular show, last time I checked, and how else do you think we still get bugs in the Spring, after the Winter kills off most if not all of the adults? Also, what about fish, amphibians, birds, and the titanic majority of life on Earth that doesn't "gestate" or even have "eggs" at all? Cyanobacteria? Bacteria? Amoebae? Salps??

[skepticalme]

It's just coincidence hunting.  They find a few examples that correspond to there bullshit idea and ignore the ones that don't.  Yes many are going to be divisible by 7, as many as you would expect by statistical probability just like all the other numbers.  Also, just saying divisible by 7 leaves a lot of wiggle room.  7 of what?  Notice they flip between days, years and even half-days.  If you can pick, choose and even make up your own units, you can make anything divisible by seven without god.

[chrisstavrous]

You should have heard this christian guy pump up panins theory he thought it was indisputable evidence. He kept on saying he had mountains of proof that the bible was true, it didn't seem like he knew he was lying.

[miekko]

It's just coincidence hunting.  They find a few examples that correspond to there bullshit idea and ignore the ones that don't.  Yes many are going to be divisible by 7, as many as you would expect by statistical probability just like all the other numbers.  Also, just saying divisible by 7 leaves a lot of wiggle room.  7 of what?  Notice they flip between days, years and even half-days.  If you can pick, choose and even make up your own units, you can make anything divisible by seven without god.

Panin is also inconsistent regarding whether he counts the number of letters, the numeric value of the letters, AND whether he uses the citation form (e.g. nominative singular for nouns, 1st person present tense for verbs) or the form that actually appears in the text. This significantly increases the chance for a hit.

[Guest Babylonian Dream]

Does he not realize that it is also evidence of sumero-babylonian paganism if it is for christianity? Their holy numbers were 7 (symbolic of the Anunna), 50 (Enlil), etc...

 

That being said, there are funner things to do with numerology. None of numerology really adding up to anything,

 

I'm disappointed though. I thought the name in the title was "Panini", I was looking forward to reading stuff about that ancient linguist.....

[miekko]

Does he not realize that it is also evidence of sumero-babylonian paganism if it is for christianity? Their holy numbers were 7 (symbolic of the Anunna), 50 (Enlil), etc...

 

That being said, there are funner things to do with numerology. None of numerology really adding up to anything,

 

I'm disappointed though. I thought the name in the title was "Panini", I was looking forward to reading stuff about that ancient linguist.....

That ancient linguist was a Hindu priest, who developed his system of describing the sounds of sanskrit only in order that the sanskrit pronunciation wouldn't be altered and therefore render the rituals invalid. 

[chrisstavrous]

I knew it was a smart idea to start a thread about this, I knew you would all get to the root of this without the christian apologist spin.

[Guest Babylonian Dream]

 

Does he not realize that it is also evidence of sumero-babylonian paganism if it is for christianity? Their holy numbers were 7 (symbolic of the Anunna), 50 (Enlil), etc...

 

That being said, there are funner things to do with numerology. None of numerology really adding up to anything,

 

I'm disappointed though. I thought the name in the title was "Panini", I was looking forward to reading stuff about that ancient linguist.....

That ancient linguist was a Hindu priest, who developed his system of describing the sounds of sanskrit only in order that the sanskrit pronunciation wouldn't be altered and therefore render the rituals invalid. 

 

Yeah, but its still a subject of interest for me from a linguistics perspective. Hindu priest or not.

[miekko]

 

 

Does he not realize that it is also evidence of sumero-babylonian paganism if it is for christianity? Their holy numbers were 7 (symbolic of the Anunna), 50 (Enlil), etc...

 

That being said, there are funner things to do with numerology. None of numerology really adding up to anything,

 

I'm disappointed though. I thought the name in the title was "Panini", I was looking forward to reading stuff about that ancient linguist.....

That ancient linguist was a Hindu priest, who developed his system of describing the sounds of sanskrit only in order that the sanskrit pronunciation wouldn't be altered and therefore render the rituals invalid. 

 

Yeah, but its still a subject of interest for me from a linguistics perspective. Hindu priest or not.

 

Sure, his achievement was undoubtedly great, but it also lead to a lot of weird stupidity - dunno to what extent he himself believed in any genuinely stupid Sanskrit-based ideas (but it's likely). For instance, many languages that use scripts based on those Sanskrit was written with don't mark all their phonological distinctions simply because it's impossible to imagine a language having phonological distinctions that Sanskrit didn't have - the weird notion that lead to this is the belief that Sanskrit was, after all, the mother language of all languages, and thus must have had *ALL* the sounds, thus making it impossible that any descendant language would have obtained any new sounds. Although he achieved a great thing, he seems to have failed to realize his achievement was applicable on *other languages* as well, and the only tangible results his research had for about 2300 years was to strengthen a kind of weird idolization of one specific language.

[Guest Babylonian Dream]

 

 

 

Does he not realize that it is also evidence of sumero-babylonian paganism if it is for christianity? Their holy numbers were 7 (symbolic of the Anunna), 50 (Enlil), etc...

 

That being said, there are funner things to do with numerology. None of numerology really adding up to anything,

 

I'm disappointed though. I thought the name in the title was "Panini", I was looking forward to reading stuff about that ancient linguist.....

That ancient linguist was a Hindu priest, who developed his system of describing the sounds of sanskrit only in order that the sanskrit pronunciation wouldn't be altered and therefore render the rituals invalid. 

 

Yeah, but its still a subject of interest for me from a linguistics perspective. Hindu priest or not.

 

Sure, his achievement was undoubtedly great, but it also lead to a lot of weird stupidity - dunno to what extent he himself believed in any genuinely stupid Sanskrit-based ideas (but it's likely). For instance, many languages that use scripts based on those Sanskrit was written with don't mark all their phonological distinctions simply because it's impossible to imagine a language having phonological distinctions that Sanskrit didn't have - the weird notion that lead to this is the belief that Sanskrit was, after all, the mother language of all languages, and thus must have had *ALL* the sounds, thus making it impossible that any descendant language would have obtained any new sounds. Although he achieved a great thing, he seems to have failed to realize his achievement was applicable on *other languages* as well, and the only tangible results his research had for about 2300 years was to strengthen a kind of weird idolization of one specific language.

 

The idea that its the mother of all tongues isn't taken very seriously by any linguist thank goodness. Though I want to know when Panini was submitted to writing, because I have doubts that it and sanskrit are half as old as claimed, as they were never written down. That's been my interest. I want to pick them apart, but I can't without the sourcematerial and being able to find relevant context.You can't find very many sources that don't put it at least to 1500 BCE which is wrong or at least extremely hard to believe.

[miekko]

 

 

 

 

Does he not realize that it is also evidence of sumero-babylonian paganism if it is for christianity? Their holy numbers were 7 (symbolic of the Anunna), 50 (Enlil), etc...

 

That being said, there are funner things to do with numerology. None of numerology really adding up to anything,

 

I'm disappointed though. I thought the name in the title was "Panini", I was looking forward to reading stuff about that ancient linguist.....

That ancient linguist was a Hindu priest, who developed his system of describing the sounds of sanskrit only in order that the sanskrit pronunciation wouldn't be altered and therefore render the rituals invalid. 

 

Yeah, but its still a subject of interest for me from a linguistics perspective. Hindu priest or not.

 

Sure, his achievement was undoubtedly great, but it also lead to a lot of weird stupidity - dunno to what extent he himself believed in any genuinely stupid Sanskrit-based ideas (but it's likely). For instance, many languages that use scripts based on those Sanskrit was written with don't mark all their phonological distinctions simply because it's impossible to imagine a language having phonological distinctions that Sanskrit didn't have - the weird notion that lead to this is the belief that Sanskrit was, after all, the mother language of all languages, and thus must have had *ALL* the sounds, thus making it impossible that any descendant language would have obtained any new sounds. Although he achieved a great thing, he seems to have failed to realize his achievement was applicable on *other languages* as well, and the only tangible results his research had for about 2300 years was to strengthen a kind of weird idolization of one specific language.

 

The idea that its the mother of all tongues isn't taken very seriously by any linguist thank goodness. Though I want to know when Panini was submitted to writing, because I have doubts that it and sanskrit are half as old as claimed, as they were never written down. That's been my interest. I want to pick them apart, but I can't without the sourcematerial and being able to find relevant context.You can't find very many sources that don't put it at least to 1500 BCE which is wrong or at least extremely hard to believe.

 

In India, several linguists still adhere to the notion that Sanskrit indeed is the mother of all languages, or at least all the Indo-European ones. The problem I am pointing to is not that he was wrong - he might not have held this particular opinion even. Sanskrit-supremacism is still alive and well in large parts of India, and if you question this, Panini's work will be held up as evidence - even though that's not what Panini tried to achieve.

 

The fact that his work had no actual followers further reduces his achievement quite a bit - he never meant it to be used with anything but Sanskrit, and his achievement thus reached its conclusion with the description of some particular Sanskrit-speakers' pronunciation. His work has of course been useful to modern linguists, but his personal impact on phonology and phonetics remains small - and his source material was too small to reach any general conclusions about phonology.

 

Anyways, as for the time when Sanskrit was spoken, I'd say the span 1000BCE to 500CE looks like a much more likely time for when something that could be recognized as Sanskrit was spoken than 1500BCE. However, ever from 3000BCE to 1000BCE you would have found ancestral languages, and the changes that happened in these languages ultimately were what generated Sanskrit. Drawing a clear line between languages in an ancestor-descendant relation is often impossible. 

[Guest Babylonian Dream]

Anyways, as for the time when Sanskrit was spoken, I'd say the span 1000BCE to 500CE looks like a much more likely time for when something that could be recognized as Sanskrit was spoken than 1500BCE. However, ever from 3000BCE to 1000BCE you would have found ancestral languages, and the changes that happened in these languages ultimately were what generated Sanskrit. Drawing a clear line between languages in an ancestor-descendant relation is often impossible. 

I'd say that sanskrit was invented at a time when India, with its rich traditions, lacked one thing. An ancient literary tradition using a language as old as aramaic, having created a script based off it, they also wanted to make a lingua franca of their own, so they borrowed from Indian languages of their time and created Sanskrit. Having been created from languages already spoken in India, its no suprise that we see in the archaeological record then indoiranian gods like Suryash, and others in Kassite records, and find ancient words in sanskrit.

[chrisstavrous]

I have an uncle who looked into this extensively. Numerology is what he called it. I used to think it was really cool, but now days I'm more interested in numbers that help explain day-to-day things and help us understand the real world and ourselves. When you start thinking on numerology, it becomes a vortex that sucks you in. Have you seen the movie, Pi?

Yeah I did year's ago, it was a strange movie.

[Guest Babylonian Dream]

Also, food for though. How could entire books predate writing? We know when writing came to India, and it kinda exploded onto the scenes:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Br%C4%81hm%C4%AB_script

 

We know that they didn't have writing prior according to Manetho. So one can only conclude, as the writing itself suggests, that it was developed from Aramaic. And these peoples and these texts are supposed to have been preserved for how long?

[miekko]

Hm, yeah, I was surprised that Sanskrit can't have been written while it had an actual viable speech community. However, there's still some weird stuff in your claims regarding it:

 

I'd say that sanskrit was invented at a time when India, with its rich traditions, lacked one thing. An ancient literary tradition using a language as old as aramaic, having created a script based off it, they also wanted to make a lingua franca of their own, so they borrowed from Indian languages of their time and created Sanskrit.

 

Sanskrit wasn't invented. We find that it developed by natural changes from earlier forms. If we take a look at other Indo-European languages' proto-languages (by reconstruction, of course, but reconstruction is a painstaking and careful process), and try to reconstruct an ancestor of theirs, Sanskrit is very close to it - just a manageable number of changes (and very natural changes, whose naturalness cannot have been understood by a group who barely had figured out how to describe sounds in the first place). Thus Sanskrit wasn't created, it evolved naturally. It clearly had a sort of elevated status among people speaking closely related languages and was used for particular ritual things. Sanskrit never was used as a lingua franca - rather the opposite, it was a language for ritual and the religious elite. Sanskrit is also very similar to Avestan, a language of which we do have records. (Similar similarities can be found with the oldest prakrits.) 

 

Occam's razor favors the notion that Sanskrit was a language that evolved naturally out of an ancestor it shared with the prakrits. This ancestor further evolved out of a shared ancestor with Avestan. Sanskrit by the name Sanskrit fits into such a time span based on the number of changes occurring in it. The Sanskrit literature we have can be from a large span of time, since learning it was a mark of education and class, but at least we can use linguistics to figure out a rough possible terminus for how early this language came into being. Further, we have stuff that is older than Sanskrit! That language is called 'Vedic Sanskrit' and we have a few good reason to know this is an even earlier language:

Especially important is that it retains stuff shared with Avestan that had been lost by the time Sanskrit came about. Only in modern times has the importance of such stuff to demonstrate relations between languages been understood. Further such rules tend to be misunderstood by people who don't have access to the language being spoken in real time - mistakes would creep in - and as far as we can tell it seems the Vedic Sanskrit texts do not suffer from mistakes of the expected nature. Thus, we can assume Vedic Sanskrit indeed reaches the time depth of about 1500 years+.

 

 

Also, you seem to be confusing 'script' with 'language', which is quite a common problem among people who don't know linguistics very well.

[Guest Babylonian Dream]

I'm not confusing a language with a script, but what I'm saying is the fact that it wasn't written down until way late, later even than asoka's brahmi script, that the likelihood of it being as old as claimed just seems harder and harder to believe. I'll personally attest that from what I know about both PIE and sanskrit, they're not as similar as they're hyped up to be. Latin is just as similar.

 

I'm actually very well read on the subject matter.