About the Book
More than 2,500 years ago, a grammarian named Pāṇini produced something the world had never seen: a complete, formal description of a language — precise enough to be a computer program, elegant enough to be considered sacred.
Before the Word traces the extraordinary parallel between Sanskrit philosophy and the architecture of artificial intelligence — two traditions separated by twenty-five centuries, both asking the same radical question: what is language before it becomes sound?
From Pāṇini's generative grammar to the transformer attention mechanism; from Bhartṛhari's sphoṭa theory to the embedding space of a large language model; from the four levels of Vāk to the layers of a neural network — this book argues these connections are not metaphorical. They are fundamental.
The Central Question
“What did the ancient tradition know — and what have we forgotten — about the relationship between words, minds, and the world?”
About the Author
Praveen Maloo grew up in India where he studied Sanskrit alongside mathematics. He has built technology companies in the United States, traveled through 170+ countries, speaks seven languages, and writes at the intersection of Indian philosophy, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence.