The Nicene-Costantinopolitan Creed in Sanskrit. Digital and Historical-Religious Analysis of William Hodge Mill’s Translation of the Words Holy Spirit

Reverend William Hodge Mill’s Sanskrit translation of the Nicene Creed was published in Calcutta in 1823 under the title Pratītivākyatrayam (The Threefold Profession of Faith, that is, the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed, and the Athanasian Creed). In this contribution, I will devote some reflections to the compound puṇyātman- found in verses 5 and 9 and used by Mill to translate the Christian theological concept of Holy Spirit into Sanskrit. This will entail a philological and historical-religious analysis of some Sanskrit texts and allow for a final reflection on the notion of person in Christian and Hindu contexts. The analyses conducted are part of multiple focuses of the ITSERR project, which aims to apply digital tools and artificial intelligence also to the Sanskrit religious texts and language, starting with the translation of the Creed into Sanskrit and the possibility of comparing this translation with a vast corpus of Sanskrit texts. We created a dataset of texts by extracting words from a large, digitised corpus, specifically the Digital Corpus of Sanskrit, using Python: the often messy and unstructured textual data was cleaned up and transformed into a format useful for training machine learning models. We used machine learning techniques to train natural language processing models using Python. These techniques include text tokenisation, sandhi splitting, and thus the recognition of phonetic changes that individual lemmas typically undergo, to train a machine learning model for the morphosyntactic analysis of Sanskrit texts. Specifically, for sandhi splitting, we are implementing deep learning techniques to divide compounds using neural networks that allow for predicting division points in Sanskrit compounds. To test the dataset we used the Sanskrit translation of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, and in this article I will focus in particular on some of the translation choices made by Mill, showing how the application of digital technologies alongside the use of tools typical of philology and the history of religions to the field of religious studies can support the advancement of the scholarship.