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6:00 PM - 7:00 PM (UTC+5.5)
Some Remarks on the Origin and Development of Indian Languages and Linguistic Area
The INDICA Center for Bharatiya Languages (CBL) presents a conversation with Professor Girish Nath Jha, currently the Chairman of the Commission for Scientific and Technical Terminology, on the 10th of July 2022 at 1800 hrs. This INDICA CBL conversation intends to put the spotlight on, amongst other things, the research findings in Dr. Jha’s paper Some Remarks on the Origin and Development of Indian Languages and Linguistic Area which was published in the book Perspectives on the Origins of Indian Civilization (2013) that he edited along with Angela Marcantonio. His research findings are likely to be of interest to those concerned with questions related to the origin of languages in the Indian subcontinent.
Speakers
Prof. Girish Nath Jha
Chairman, Commission for Scientific and Technical Terminology, MoE, GOI (on deputation from JNU)
Prof. Girish Nath Jha is currently the Chairman of the Commission for Scientific and Technical Terminology (CSTT) of Ministry of Education, Govt of India. He is a professor of Computational Linguistics at Jawaharlal Nehru University(JNU) at the School of Sanskrit and Indic Studies. He is also a Concurrent Faculty at the School of Engineering, Center of Linguistics and at the Special Center of e-learning in JNU. Prof Jha has served as the Chairperson of the Special Center of Sanskrit Studies, JNU and was the founding Dean of the School of Sanskrit & Indic Studies at JNU. He has also held the position of the Director of International Collaboration and as Coordinator of Ayurveda Biology program at JNU. His research interests include Indian languages, corpora and standards, Sanskrit and Hindi linguistics, lexicography, Science & Technology in Sanskrit, Machine Translation, e-learning, web-based technologies, RDBMS techniques, software design and localization. Details on his work can be obtained from http://sanskrit.jnu.ac.in Prof Jha has done collaborative research with the Center for Indic Studies, U. Mass, Dartmouth, USA as "Mukesh and Priti Chatter Distinguished Professor of History of Science" during 2009-12. He was awarded DAAD fellowship in 2014 and 2016 to teach Digital Humanities and Indology at University of Würzburg, Germany and has been a visiting Professor at the University of Florence in the summer of 2016. He has also been awarded the prestigious Datta Peetha Aasthan Vidwan Award for Sanskrit. His work on revival of Sharada script earned him KECSS felicitation award. Prof. Jha did his M.A., M.Phil. and Ph.D. in Linguistics (Computational Linguistics) from JNU and then got another masters degree in Linguistics (Natural Language Interface) from University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, USA in 1999. He worked as software engineer and software development specialist in the USA before joining JNU in 2002. Prof Jha has books published by Springer, Cambridge Scholar Publishing among others and has over 138 research papers/presentations/publications and around 240 talks. He has supervised 38 Ph.D. and 40 M.Phil. research students so far. Prof Jha has had several consultancies including those from Google, Nuance, Swiftkey, Microsoft Research, Microsoft Corporation, Linguistic Data Consortium (U. Penn), U.Mass Dartmouth, EZDI among others. Prof Jha has completed several sponsored projects for Indian language technology development and has led a consortium of 17 universities/institutes for developing corpora and standards for Indian languages.