I was looking at an old Sanskrit shloka.
I saw the following verse - and as I know Sanskrit (or Saṁśkrutaṁ), I translated it roughly.
tukā nātha kabīra ete ādikavayah |
nāmā gadimā kintu dwijakavīdvayah ||
gula ravi thākūra gāliba trimūrtī |
bahiṇā ekamevā caturastrā kavayitrī ||
I soon realized that the shloka was referring to several Indian poets: Tukaram, Eknath, Kabir, Namdeo, G. D. Madgulkar (gadimā), Gulzar, Ravindranath Thakur, Mirza Galib and Bahinabai Chaudhari.
But the translation is a bit nonsensical - and also some of them are very modern Indian poets, and thus can't be mentioned in an ancient shloka.
Tuka, Nath and Kabir were the original poets.
Nama and Gadima were both born twice.
Gulzar, Ravi Thakur and Galib were a trio.
Bahina was the sole versatile poet.
On further research, I found that this is actually a classic Aryabhatta numeration shloka, where each poet represents an integer with a different number of distinct prime factors.
Here's the system which I found:
The numbers are represented by the words according to a scheme called the Aryabhata numeration. I do not exactly remember how the scheme works, but I’m confident the numbers on this paper are correct. Perhaps you can try to reverse-engineer the scheme!
While you do not need to know the Devanagari script to decipher the scheme (the Latin transcriptions have all the information you need), the organization of the letters in the Devanagari alphabet might be useful:
Vowels: a ā i ī u ū ṛ ṝ ḷ ḹ e ai o au
Consonants: k kh g gh ṅ c ch j jh ñ ṭ ṭh ḍ ḍh ṇ t th d dh n p ph b bh m y r l v ś ṣ s h
What is the actual meaning of the shloka (not the one with all the poets)?
Further, how does the numeration scheme work like?
Hint:
Тхе Деванагари сцрипт ис а сегментед вритинг сыстем. Аццординг то Арябхаттаьс нумберинг слока, еверы сыллабле хас а меанинг. Финд тхе меанингс анд деципхер тхе сыстем. (фор ехампле), ik + ā = kā анд со он.
Adapted from this source. A question of the Panini Linguistics Olympiad conducted every year.
