Talk:Pali

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[edit] IPA

How would one write Pali in IPA? I know Pali is pronounced as if it was spelled Palee, but as an English reader, I can understand how a lot may say Palai. --Dara 23:26, 12 Dec 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Devanagari

I'd like to see the Pali in the article put into Devanagari (or some other commonly used script). I'd do it myself, but I'm not sure whether Pali spelling conventions are the same as for Sanskrit... --Marnen Laibow-Koser (talk) 19:23, 16 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Changing the Pali terms in the article to be in Devanagari would not be reflective of either current or historical usage. To my knowledge, the only time Pali has been written in Devanagari is during attempts by followers of Dr. Amdedkar to encourage the use of Pali among Indian converts to Buddhism. For an English-language article, using the correct Romanizations (explained in the Pali Alphabet (Unicode) section) is both the most accesible and equally accurate. Devanagari would mostly be of use to Sanskritists, I believe; Sinhala, Thai, or Burmese would be more helpful to students of Pali, and the Romanization probably has the widest accesibility. --Clay Collier 22:13, 9 May 2005 (UTC)

I would agree with the usefulness of Sinhala, Thai, and Burmese along with Devanagari. Below are the Pali terms from the article in Thai script.

Pali - บาลี (or ภาษาบาลี lit. "Pali language")

Suttapiṭaka - สุตตปิฎก

Jātaka - ชาดก

dharanis - I don't think this is Pali, at least it's not in any of my dictionarys?

anything else? Obhaso 19:47, 23 May 2006 (UTC)

This is absolutely correct, and I say this as a student of Sanksrit who is currently enjoying OSX's excellent unicode support and built-in Devangari keyboard (nothing comparable, I believe, would help me enter proper romanization). -- कुक्कुरोवाच|Talk‽

OK. I was not aware of the full script situation with Pali. I was assuming that it was parallel to Sanskrit (where, although other scripts are used, the default script is Devanagari). What's the convention among students of Pali? Is there one? --Marnen Laibow-Koser (talk) (desk) 21:49, 9 November 2005 (UTC)

Reasonable question with no reasonable answer. Sri Lankan monks are astonished that I can read and write Pali in classical, literary Sinhalese script --and, yes, I can also type it on my computer. "Why don't you just use English?", they ask, meaning Romanized phonetics --and often going on to state that they assume the European standard is in some sense "superior" to the indigenous orthography (i.e., more authoritative or academic). The Thai script is in a difficult situation, as it is vernacular, and Khom/Lanna are instead associated with the religion itself --yet are regional rather than national in their connotations. I suppose that the orthography is least "fraught" in Cambodia and Burma --oh yeah, I do read and write Pali in all of those scripts, too. So, my personal answer is: I make use of all of the scripts, and therefore have access to a wider variety of printed materials and manuscripts. I encourage other students to do the same. However, Romanization is the more common crutch. (www.pali.pratyeka.org) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 222.123.14.208 (talk) 14:10, 7 January 2008 (UTC)

This is English Wikipedia, & should therefore follow the standard practice in English-language sources of writing Pali in Latin script. Hindi WP should write it in nagari, Thai WP in Thai &c. Peter jackson (talk) 15:10, 27 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Why does this article get worse and worse?

I'm sorry to see that after my attempts to revise the information on the history of the language some months ago, it has been re-written to reflect the usual errors and lies.

This is a sad demonstration that the "democratic method" is not applicable to the process of writing an encyclopedia.

Seemingly nobody is interested in checking authoritative sources, or resolving conflicting accounts (that arise on the wiki) by reference to real scholarship; they just mimic what their "Intro to Hindi" teacher told them, or what their "Intro to Sanskrit" book vaguely suggested about Buddhist sources.

Instead of looking at a revision and thinking "Hey, this isn't quite what my 'Intro to Hindi' book suggests ... maybe I'd better look into it" it seems that the majority of the ill-informed just respond by reducing the text to their own level of ignorance. "Hey, this isn't what I already know --it must be wrong!"

I don't know if anyone participates in this "Wiki" with an open mind that someone else might know more than they do; it really doesn't seem to be the case at all.

I notice that the article on Prakrit (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prakrit) has not been reduced to quite such stupidity as the article on Pali --probably because fewer people have edited it (...or read it) since I re-wrote it myself.

Depressing.

It would be much easier to keep track of which edits you were talking about if you had a user account instead of just an IP, or if you could at least mention specifically which revisions you are talking about. There are several origin theories for Pali; it's far from a settled issue. Any claim that Pali was *never* a language spoken as something other than a literary language seems very difficult to prove conclusively- we don't know exactly what the differences between spoken and written language were in ancient times because we have no record of spoken language. I'll readily agree that I've seen references that indicate that Pali was an artificially constructed language never used as a vernacular- but I've also seen references that indicate that Pali developed out of a lingua franca used after the death of the Buddha. Drawing a line between the precursor language as used in daily life (which is known only through reconstruction) and the literary language seems a fairly thorny task. We can make hypotheses on the basis of differences between modern written vs. spoken usage, and patterns of language use in South Asia, but that is not the same as having direct proof. References would be extremely helpful here for establishing what the positions are, and who is proposing them. Do you have a reference for the claim that Pali was never a spoken language? Similar references for the Prakrit article would be helpful as well. I'll dig around and see what I can find. --Clay Collier 07:58, 2 September 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Pāli and Pali

I sort of understand why this page was moved from Pali to Pāli, but I don't understand why Pali became a disambiguation page. I propose to move the dab page to Pali (disambiguation) and make Pali a redirect. - Nat Krause^(Talk!) 23:24, 4 April 2006 (UTC)

Support: I have redundantly brought this up below as well...—Lenoxus 03:10, 28 January 2007 (UTC)

Against. Having a better understanding of the complexities involved, I have changed my mind. — Lenoxus 18:45, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Link removed

You can view seven alphabetic systems traditionally used to render Pāli in these documents

I removed this link because, on examination, it turned out that it was somewhat inaccurate (problematic glyphs in the Romanized Pāli and the wrong Devanāgarī aksharas for o and s) and, from a practical point of view, not very helpful - no one not already familiar with the alphabets can easily determine which letter corresponds to which sound. RandomCritic 02:04, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

Those errors appear to have been fixed at some prior point in revising that PDF. Maybe you could just provide a link to the glut of such charts at www.pali.pratyeka.org in general? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 202.62.101.48 (talk) 03:00, 1 February 2007 (UTC).

The Devanagari does seem to have been fixed. I still do not understand some of the symbols used in Romanized Pali. The use of a j-n ligature ( ɲ ) to represent the velar nasal seems very strange, since this is an IPA symbol for a palatal nasal.

The conventional sign usually used is n with overdot: ṅ. I have seen the n-j ligature (ŋ ) used to represent anusvara, which has a certain amount of justification since in some of the traditional pronunciations of Pali, anusvara is pronounced as a velar nasal (which is what ŋ stands for in IPA). But the usual convention is ṃ.

I also wonder why some of the other alphabets commonly used to write Pali, e.g. Thai, are not provided?RandomCritic 03:23, 1 February 2007 (UTC)

Well, I visited here by chance. There is something that bothered me since a long time regarding romanized Pali. It is an adaptation of romanized Sanskrit. In the 1800s they did not have adequate letters to represent Indic sounds. It is the same problem that English faced twice in its history. That story might help to understand the problem better. At the time when Latin replaced Runic in England, Latin did not have anything to represent the dental t and d as well as a as in hat. So they added Thorn (þ), Edth (ð) and Ash (æ) to the new English alphabet (I can't find from where ð and æ came. May be they improvised them).

This was all good as long as books were hand written. Then William Caxton came with the press. Caxton in his hurry to print indulgences and books for the rich and famous neglected to fix the problem of Latin not having types for the above three letters. Spelling and writing diverged ever since in English. Today we call þe ye as in "Know ye by these presents..."

Getting back to Pali, in the 1800s they only had hand operated or straddle presses and pages were hand composed with lead type and then hand bound. When it came to making accent letters for the alphabet, they had to take into consideration how Pali and Sanskrit were to be printed. Those days they used brass (strips) rules to print lines. The printers cut these rules into the width of the individual letters and placed them above the types to make macrons. And they only had to make them pointed to make dot accents. (Acute and grave accents would not have been easy to improvise this way). Recall that Indic languages have two pairs of t and d. One set corresponds with English t and d in Sri Lanka where Davids was romanizing Pali. (In India they are retroflex sounds). The other set, that occurs 10 times or more are the dentals corresponding to English digraph th, but as stops. So, to make things easier for the printers they decided to use the regular letters to represent the more numerous dentals and placed macron on t and d that represent the regular English sounds. The result: Accented or not, everyone reads both t and d just the same way!

Use of the m for anusvara (a ring or dot in Indic) makes one think that it is a close lip sound like m. It is not. It is exactly the same sound as the digraph ng as in dung, sing etc.

Both Pali and Sanskrit could be typed if the Old English letters are used and a few other commonly available European letters are added to the alphabet. (Use US-International keyboard). I used the following alphabet to completely transliterate Pali and Sanskrit found in the discourses found at www.metta.lk which seems to have the best version of Tripitaka. A Word macro converted the pages perfectly from the hack font used at the web site. It was proven to be flawless by displaying it in original Sinhala script using a smartfont.

Practical romanized Pali:(read the edit page to see it better formatted)

a aa i ii u uu
e o
k kh g gh ñ (velars)
c ch j jh ç (palatals)
t th d dh µ (alveolars)
þ þh ð ðh n (dentals)
p ph b bh m (bilabials)
y r l v (approximants)
s h
ø (dark el -– sound of ‘le’ in bicycle)
á aá í ií ú uú
é ó
(sá = sung, kí = king, bií = being, dégu = dengue, dó = dong)

--68.94.201.181 03:39, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

There are a number of errors in the lengthy comment above. I'll just mention the important one. What is said about the pronunciation of anusvara is not correct. Pronunciation of Pali varies between (& within) countries. This is only 1 version. Peter jackson 09:59, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

A note to Peter Jackson: the only website I know of that deals with (and attempts to detail) regional variations in the phonetic values of Pali glyphs is my own: http://www.pali.pratyeka.org/#Phonology

I've since received some interesting feedback from Burmese specialists, and, of course, more could be done --but this provides a good starting point for students grappling with these issues. I hope you'll pass the link along. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 222.123.14.208 (talk) 14:15, 7 January 2008 (UTC)

I believe the above comment (from R.C.)is not correct, viz., both ŋ and ɲ are graphic combinations of "n" and "g" (the "hook below" is regularly interpreted as the bottom half of the letter "g") --and these are variously used to indicate "-ng"/"-gn" sounds of some kind. It should be kept in mind that IPA code comprises all sounds made by European languages, but certainly not all sounds to be found in Asia (have you looked at the range of Laotian vowel sounds lately?). The French would generally interpret -gn- as what an English speaker might write out as "-ny-" or a Spaniard would write as an "n" with a tilde above. Pali texts in Roman transliteration have struggled to distinguish the anuswara (niggahita) from the sound at the end of the first line of the alphabet. With any of the systems used in textbooks, dictionaries, etc., one may simply say "take it or leave it" --this is mere transliteration after all. The dream that the IPA could encompass the whole world with a single system of "one-to-one phonetic correspondence" ends at the Ural mountains.

Although well intentioned as a review of early crises faced by typesetters, this discussion now seems to present the misleading suggestion that þ or ð can (or should) be used in transliterating Pali. As for the question of who transliterated what (first) and when, compare the [pratyeka.org/rask/ trailblazing work by Rasmus Rask].

I don't see the relevance of all this. Wikipedia should add a link to these transliterations if and only if they are in fairly common use. The Handbook of the IPA clearly demonstrates phonetic transcriptions for quite a range of languages, including Hindi and Sindhi, but it's not designed to be a transliteration or even a viable alphabet for a language. In reality, the IPA uses diacritics for French and Irish.--Prosfilaes (talk) 15:31, 12 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Paragraphs removed

I have removed the following paragraphs for lack of relevance to the article:

This is demonstrably true (e.g.) in the instance of Ashvaghosa, a Pāli-educated Buddhist monk, who became the first author of the Sanskrit kavya genre of poetry, highly influential on Sanskrit poetics thereafter. Likewise, in Sanskrit philosophy, post-Buddhist schools such as Shankara's Vedanta have been directly influenced both by Buddhist Philosophy and argumentation, with concomitant effects in the use of the language itself.

Within the context of religious writings, similar-sounding words to those found in Sanskrit can have significantly different meanings than those of Pāli. The active re-definition and re-invention of the religious meanings assigned to certain key terms (such as dharma/dhamma) was an active aspect of philosophic debate for many centuries, and the Buddhist, Jains, and various schools of Hinduism all had competitive notions of the value and significance of these terms.

The philosophy of early Mahayana Buddhism found in Sanskrit and the Buddhism recorded in Pāli are, in many respects, mutually opposed; however, historical sources indicate that these were not the only schools, nor the only languages, that participated in the debates within the Buddhist fold. There is no extant Buddhist literature of the Prakrit language Paisaci, but this and other languages were associated with particular philosophical approaches to Buddhist doctrine (and particular sectarian affiliations) in recorded history.

These paragraphs fail to distinguish between a language and the philosophical ideas conveyed in that language. While it may well be argued that the word buddháḥ means one thing in Hindu literature, buddhaḥ means another thing in Mahāyāna Buddhist literature, and buddho means yet a third thing in Theravāda literature (and may mean several different things within each of those literary and philosophical traditions), the differences in meaning are only accidentally linked to the differences in the dialect or language employed. A Mahāyāna writer might polemicize against the Theravāda concept of nibbānaṃ (this is a hypothetical instance); but, writing in Sanskrit (Classical or Hybrid), he will call the concept nirvāṇam regardless of which concept is under discussion. The choice of phonetic shape for the term is determined by linguistic context (i.e., what language the author is writing in), not by the definition of the word. The value of a technical term will vary according to the point of view of the author using the term; it is poor scholarship to attempt to embed a philosophical definition, which will necessarily vary between schools and authors, into the fabric of the language.

The article should be about the Pāli language, a matter of primarily linguistic concern and only secondarily -- and not intrinsically -- of philosophical concern. There is already an article on Theravāda Buddhism; general characterizations of this nature belong in that article, not in an article on Pāli.

I don't know of any direct evidence that Aśvaghoṣa was "Pāli-educated". RandomCritic 18:12, 27 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Alveolar plosives

Are the sounds given as alveolar plosives in the consonant table actually alveolar? I would have thought them to be dental, which is the case in just about every other Indo-Aryan language. --Grammatical error 20:58, 29 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] HTML

There is at least one error in the table under the ASCII heading: two different characters (Unicode 61626 & 61686) are given the same HTML code. Peter jackson 10:22, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

Fixed. RandomCritic 12:52, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] An issue and a question

First: It appears that the talkpage for Pali (disambiguation) redirects here. This is confusing in ways that don't seem useful to me. Second, I'm wondering if the word "Pali", without the mark over the A, is a term (derogative or otherwise) for Palestinian — what I've read here would suggest so, but that blog is obviously not the most solid source. —Lenoxus 03:09, 28 January 2007 (UTC) Issue moved to Talk:Pali. Lenoxus 18:44, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Add section on orthography?

Given that there's a section on phonology, how about a brief section on orthography?

It could be quite short, with links out to the various websites that provide charts on this information, e.g.,

http://www.omniglot.com/writing/brahmi.htm http://www.omniglot.com/writing/khmer.htm etc. etc. http://pali.pratyeka.org/PaliRosettaStone.pdf —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 202.62.101.48 (talk) 03:11, 1 February 2007 (UTC).

[edit] Pali Wikipedia

This article includes a link to Pali Wikipedia. On following the link I find a main page in devanagari script, with no immediately obvious way to convert the display to other scripts. Why are Indians being allowed to take over Pali? Only a pretty small percentage of Pali users use nagari. If Serbo-Croat Wikipedia were confined to one script it would start a war. Peter jackson 12:04, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

I think the Pali wikipedia was previously in romanized script- but there wasn't really any content to speak of. There seems to be a widely held belief among Buddhists in India that Pali is 'supposed' to be written in devanagari- witness the numerous attempts to introduce devanagari text into this article. It's an accessibility issue that should be brought up at the Pali WP- fortunately, I think a war is pretty much out of the question. --Clay Collier 23:10, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

I don't think that the practice of using Devanagari as the script is entirely due to "Indians being allowed to take over Pali", which is a rather divisive statement. In Western academic literature, the texts are generally printed either in IAST as the romanization standard or in Devanagari, which became the most common Indic script used by European Indologists who popularized the practice in the last century. Buddhipriya 04:33, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

This is not correct. In Western academic literature, Pali is always printed in latin script. Peter jackson 10:01, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

Both the use of Devanagari and Romanization are contentious in-as-much-as anybody can be bothered to contend the issue. However, until recently, typesetting classical Burmese, classical Sinhalese, etc., was simply too time-consuming and technically unreliable to be a viable alternative. Those days are fast coming to a close. Obversely, no single Theravada country has enough scholarly "clout" to assert its national script as "standard". Political instability has scholarship of any kind in Cambodia, Burma, Sri Lanka, etc., for the past century, with conditions in Thailand not much better; so the relative "stability" offered by India and its national script has been an alternative --even if not a good one-- in part because the use of Devanagari neither slights Sri Lanka nor Thailand, etc. (www.pali.pratyeka.org) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 125.26.180.9 (talk) 10:42, 6 January 2008 (UTC)

I suppose the question here is this. Somebody has started a Pali Wikipedia in nagari. Suppose someone else wants to start one in Latin, Sinhalese, Burmese or Thai script. Would they be allowed to? If not, would the authorities make Pali WP adopt a script conversion system so that anyone could click on their preferred script, rather like clicking on a preferred language from www.wikipedia.org? If the answers to both questions are no, then the authorities would be unfairly imposing the script of a small minority on everyone else. Peter jackson (talk) 12:08, 26 January 2008 (UTC)

I don't understand what you mean by "has been an alternative". Are you claiming that Sinhalese, Thais &/or Burmese have been printing Pali in nagari? Peter jackson (talk) 12:10, 26 January 2008 (UTC)

Nagari has been an alternative for those who actually read Pali, i.e. there is actually a reliable edition of the canon (in print and available) in Devanagari, along with dictionaries, grammars, and other supporting material. During the early days (or "heroic period") of the Maha-Bodhi society, they printed and typeset many works in Devanagari (for explicitly stated political reasons, with nationalistic aspirations) --and these editions were distributed throughout the Theravada world (where they can still be found, and used). —Preceding unsigned comment added by 58.136.95.146 (talk) 04:05, 5 February 2008 (UTC)

Of course ther's a nagari edition of the Canon in print (transcribed from the Burmese, tho' with a lot of misprints I'm told), & of course it's an alternative as are Latin, Burmese, Sinhalese, Thai &, at least in theory, Khmer. So what? I can't see the point of this. It remains the csae that nagari is not the script for Pali, & WP should not treat it as such, & the standard English-language usage is Latin script, so that should be followed by English WP. Is there any dispute about that? Peter jackson (talk) 12:17, 8 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Pali grammar

Any thought to adding a section on Pali grammar — similar to that on other language pages such as Latin#Grammar (which is just a summary of larger articles) or even Greek_language#Characteristics?

If I may add, it appears that this article has terrifically detailed information helpful to those who know Sanskrit; but for those who know only or primarily English, there's little information (e.g. on conjugation, declension, syntax). Is this purposeful for some reason? (For instance, as a parallel, I know the Buddhist meditation article has no instructions for actually meditating but this is because it attempts to systematize other WP articles that provide such information.)

Basically just curious. Thanks to all those whose hard efforts have created that excellent information that this article already contains. Mettāya, Larry Rosenfeld (talk) 05:36, 26 August 2007 (UTC)

No, it's just that nobody's gotten around to doing it yet. I contributed some of the information on phonology, but never got back to doing anything on morphology or syntax -- partly because, although I do study Indic historical linguistics including Pali, I don't specialize in Pali. RandomCritic 07:06, 26 August 2007 (UTC)

RC, Thanks for the quick and helpful response. Very nice work on the phonology section too! Kudos!

BTW, I see I left out the most obvious article/section with which to compare this: Sanskrit#Grammar, not to mention Sanskrit_grammar.

FWIW, I guess partly what sparked my interest is that I've started working with Gair & Karunatillake's "A New Course in Reading Pali" (based on an on-line Bhikkhu Bodhi recommendation and after I somehow lost interest in the classic Warder) and found myself having difficulty parsing some of their Pali examples (in particular, AN 1.16.6.13-16, for which there's no answer key that I know of at this time -- though I finally found Thanissaro and Nanamoli translations for similar texts [e.g., SN 45.8]). And I think the problem is that I have little appreciation for the various nounal cases (nom., acc., gen., etc.). I think I'm beginning to make headway but it's only because I've been reading about noun cases in my wife's Wheelock's Latin text (Latin seeming to have all but the instrumental and locative cases). It then dawned on me that there might be a WP Pali article putting such in context ... but, alas :-)

Thanks again for all your help here and elsewhere, Larry Rosenfeld (talk) 18:08, 26 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] ṃ (phonology)

Any phonological analysis regarding ṃ ? Thanks yet again! Larry Rosenfeld (talk) 19:12, 24 September 2007 (UTC)

RandomCritic - thanks so much! Your exposition is always interesting and helpful! - Larry Rosenfeld (talk) 22:05, 25 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Pali script

The Ashok pillar in Lumbini, Nepal was written in Brahmi script in Pali. It is one of the oldest remaining literature in Pali. None of the other scripts have been used before this. Besides, the script was used when the language was thriving. So, I think that it should be considered as the native script.--Eukesh 21:06, 30 November 2007 (UTC)

The obvious problem is that while the Asokan inscriptions are in Prakrit dialects that are more or less similar to Pali, none of them are exactly Pali. RandomCritic 03:38, 1 December 2007 (UTC)

I'll take off any mention of a "native" script until we can get some good references.To my understanding Pali was never even written down until it moved to Sri Lanka? So the concept of a native script really isn't relevant. Echalon (talk) 18:49, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

"Native" is not an applicable concept. However, "first script" is less contentious. We have Pali inscriptions in Sri Lanka older than Ashoka (but of the same period & dynasty, viz., not much older) using an even cruder, but otherwise similar, script. Thus, do not assume that because the writing took place in Sri Lanka, the orthography was so different than in contemporaneous mainland India. The notion that no writing-down of Pali whatsoever took place prior to the systematic "canonization" (viz., re-organization) of the texts is historically absurd --albeit a common religious conceit, as the modern religion valorizes memorization. K.R. Norman has argued that the first (viz., earliest) orthography used was of greater importance than scholars have heretofore supposed, and that this is demonstrable from changes made to certain poems when the orthography was "modernized", and geminate clusters spelled out in full; the putative "first" script here alluded to would be broadly similar to Ashoka's, and, e.g., not write out geminate "stacks" in full. (www.pali.pratyeka.org) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 125.26.180.9 (talk) 10:34, 6 January 2008 (UTC)

The statement above that "We have Pali inscriptions in Sri Lanka older than Ashoka" is almost certainly false. All the authorities I've come across say that Asoka's inscriptions are the oldest written sources for any Indian language, & Pali didn't exist at that time anyway. It evolved over centuries. Peter jackson (talk) 17:39, 8 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Specifying the romanization system used?

Could someone specify which romanization system is being used in this article? Is it IAST? I think this should really be specified somewhere within the article. Echalon (talk) 16:12, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Emic vs. Etic vs. real scholarship

Some careful thinking should be done as to whether the opinions of Sanskrit texts (viz., Hindu or, in some cases, Mahayana) are to be counted as "Emic" or "Etic" in relation to the Pali canon.

It is quite evident that whoever wrote that section (as it is currently) is not working with the primary texts.

I do not mean to say that it is of zero value ... but it is both confusing and confused.

Sanskrit sources say various things about Pali, e.g., that (in the context of classical Indian theatre) it is only appropriate for the parts spoken by whores (cf., M. Deshpande's _Sanskrit & Prakrit: Sociolinguistic Issues_) --but is this "Emic" or "Etic"?

As for what Pali sources themsleves say about the Pali language, that is quite another matter.

The current section needs to be re-thought --if not discarded and re-written.

The (often commented upon) notion that Pali is "the original language of all beings" does not mean that it is the language of "reality" in the vague sense suggested by the current article. The specific claim made in one commentary that were a child to be abandoned in the woods without human parents (e.g., raised by wolves) he/she would naturally grow up to speak Pali, is currently badly (mis-)represented with the statement that Pali "is the language of... wolf-children". It would be impossible for a reader without prior knowledge of the specific anecdote to remotely understand what is meant by this section of the article, as it is now worded.

Thus, the text is now "confused and confusing", as I say.

The notion that Pali nouns correspond to "actual entities" (viz., "reality") relates to schools of philosophy first found in commentaries and sub-commentaries to the Abhidhamma --and these textual sources are chronologically and geographically far removed from the Buddha's own milieu. The changing notion of the language over time could thus be commented upon, perhaps drawing on Dr. Aloysus Pieris' studies of the Abhidhamma commentaries. (I must leave this to someone with access to a better library than I).

In Pali texts, the gods speak Pali; in Sanskrit texts, the gods speak Sanskrit, and so on. This does not necessarily entail the tacit claim that the gods speak Pali all the time. It is well worth noting precisely who makes such claims precisely when (viz., which period of the development of the language and tradition gives rise to which lingual conceits). In modern Thailand, I have been informed that studying Pali will allow me to converse with birds; however, I am not aware of any special (religious) significance of birds, nor any claim about conversing with birds, in the classical Pali texts themselves. Nor, for that matter, has a bird yet spoken to me in Pali.

Of course, I prefer the description of the language on my own website: www.pali.pratyeka.org —Preceding unsigned comment added by 125.26.180.9 (talk) 10:29, 6 January 2008 (UTC)

Pali is the language of Theravada Buddhism, & essentially nothing else. It's therefore proper to give briefly the traditional Theavada views about the language. For the moment I've simply said "by the time of the Pali commentaries", but bear in mind that most of the material in them is much older. Unfortunately, we can't usually tell which parts.

I'm sure there are conversations involving birds in the canonical Jataka. Peter jackson (talk) 12:03, 26 January 2008 (UTC)

I'd forgotten that there's also 1 in the Vinaya: PTS ii 161f (BD V 226f). Peter jackson (talk) 12:04, 28 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Dharanis

Is it correct to talk of dharanis in the early texts? According to Prebish & Keown, Introducing Buddhism, page 89, they are later. Peter jackson (talk) 15:04, 27 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Box

I've deleted the nagari here, for reasons already discused in detail above. Alternatively, it would be perfectly reasonable in this context to include all the main scripts, but I leave that to those with the technical expertise. Peter jackson (talk) 11:53, 20 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] v

Article gives only 1 pronunciation, but in fact it varies. Could someone with knowlege of phonetics deal with this? Peter jackson (talk) 12:04, 19 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] No word-initial consonant clusters in Pali?

Are there any word-initial consonant clusters in Pali? --88.76.249.172 (talk) 11:07, 4 April 2008 (UTC)

Almost all Pali initial consonant clusters were simplified to single consonants. A very few remain, possibly by being introduced from Sanskrit or from other dialects, following Pali's early sound changes. They are:

kr in kriyā (beside normal kiriyā)
kv in kva "where"
tv in tvaṃ "you"
dv fairly frequently, mostly in compounds and derivatives of dvi "two" and dvāra "door"
ny in nyāsa "something left as security for a loan"
pl in plava "something which floats" and plavaṅgama "monkey"
by in several words, always as a variant of vy (e.g. byaggha and vyaggha, "tiger")
br in brahma "Brahma" (and its derivatives), and derivatives of the verbal roots brū "speak" and bruh "increase", including brahanta "immense"
vy in a large number of words
sn in sneha "stickiness", beside the usual sineha
sv in several words

RandomCritic (talk) 20:38, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Kriyā is postcanonical, as pointed out by Aggavamsa. Peter jackson (talk) 17:40, 8 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Word-medial consonant clusters in Pali

Are there any word-medial consonant clusters other than geminates, homorganic nasal + consonant and sonorant + h in Pali? --88.78.14.175 (talk) 10:31, 2 June 2008 (UTC)