Project description
Poetry as a tool for teaching ancient linguistics
Much of early south Asia’s linguistic knowledge was transmitted through highly technical grammatical systems that are difficult to interpret today, as key teaching tools survive only in scattered and understudied manuscripts. This leaves gaps in the history of education and intellectual culture. Supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the VERGAP project examines a rare ninth-century Sanskrit text that turns Pāṇini’s grammatical lists into poetry to aid learning. The project will produce the first critical edition from surviving manuscripts, combining philology with digital methods to analyse teaching practices, develop new research tools and highlight poetic strategies for communicating technical knowledge. Overall, VERGAP demonstrates the enduring value of poetic approaches to teaching technical knowledge.
Objective
VERGAP investigates a unique Sanskrit text from ninth-century Kashmir, the Gaṇapāṭhavivṛti, which versifies and interprets Pāṇini’s Gaṇapāṭha, the lexical lists underlying the Aṣṭādhyāyī, one of the most influential grammars of antiquity. By turning highly technical material into poetry, the text made complex knowledge easier to memorise and teach, offering a rare stand-alone witness to how linguistic theory was transmitted in early South Asia. VERGAP will prepare the first critical edition of this work from surviving manuscripts, enriched with annotations on grammar, lexicon, metre, and style, and will analyse its pedagogical strategies alongside computationally aided case studies of its vocabulary across dated corpora. Combining philology, manuscript studies, literary analysis, and digital humanities, the project will explore the intersection of linguistics, education, and cultural history, and will test how innovation in grammatical lists relates to actual usage. All research will be conducted in an open digital environment (Saktumiva), with transparent methods, continuous updates, and outputs archived for reuse, while training and corpus-based analysis will be supported by the INTELLEXUS project. By uniting traditional philology with computational approaches, VERGAP will provide new tools for scholars, strengthen the study of South Asia’s manuscript heritage, and highlight the long history of poetic strategies in teaching technical knowledge. Through open access editions, international outreach, and public communication, it will demonstrate the relevance of Sanskrit grammar to broader questions of knowledge organisation, memory, and pedagogy, and will reinforce Europe’s role as a leader in innovative and interdisciplinary humanities research.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
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CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- humanities history and archaeology history ancient history
- social sciences educational sciences pedagogy
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
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Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
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Call for proposal
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(opens in new window) HORIZON-MSCA-2025-PF
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20148 Hamburg
Germany
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