Mnemonics

The best-known example of a mnemonic
system comes in the study of the Vedas,
the oldest Hindu religious texts.
Traditionally, the power of the Vedas is
not derived from the meaning of the
words, but in the very sounds themselves. It was imperative for the text to
be conveyed without error. This posed a
significant challenge. The Vedas have
been orally transmitted by an elaborate
system of learning strategies, keeping
the text unchanged for over three thousand years, identical in all parts of India.
This remarkable feat was achieved by
memorizing the text in differing patterns: as verses, as the individual words,
as pairs of words in sequential succession (ab, bc, cd, and so forth), and
according to some reports, backwards.
The ultimate aim of all of these patterns
was to render the text into sheer sound,
rather than phrases with definite syntactic meaning, since the latter could be
subject to substitutions. Although this
effort has succeeded in preserving the
sacred sounds, in many cases the meanings of these words have become
unclear, especially for words which
appear only once. This problem was evident as early as the fifth century B.C.E.,
when Yaska, the grammarian, wrote the
Nirukta, explaining the meaning of
many of these words.