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93-446: The Tibeto-Burman family of languages, which extends over a huge geographic range, is characterized by great typological diversity, comprising languages that range from the highly tonal, monosyllabic , analytic type with practically no affixational morphology, like the Loloish languages , to marginally tonal or atonal languages with complex systems of verbal agreement morphology, like

186-521: A Central branch of Tibeto-Burman based on morphological evidence. Roger Blench and Mark Post (2011) list a number of divergent languages of Arunachal Pradesh , in northeastern India, that might have non-Tibeto-Burman substrates, or could even be non-Tibeto-Burman language isolates : Blench and Post believe the remaining languages with these substratal characteristics are more clearly Sino-Tibetan: Notes Bibliography Pali Pāli ( / ˈ p ɑː l i / ), also known as Pali-Magadhi ,

279-415: A Middle Indo-Aryan language , is different from Classical Sanskrit more with regard to its dialectal base than the time of its origin. A number of its morphological and lexical features show that it is not a direct continuation of Ṛgvedic Sanskrit. Instead it descends from one or more dialects that were, despite many similarities, different from Ṛgvedic . The Theravada commentaries refer to

372-515: A before doubled consonants: The vowels ⟨i⟩ and ⟨u⟩ are lengthened in the flexional endings including: -īhi, -ūhi and -īsu A sound called anusvāra (Skt.; Pali: niggahīta ), represented by the letter ṁ (ISO 15919) or ṃ (ALA-LC) in romanization, and by a raised dot in most traditional alphabets, originally marked the fact that the preceding vowel was nasalized. That is, aṁ , iṁ and uṁ represented [ã] , [ĩ] and [ũ] . In many traditional pronunciations, however,

465-483: A clade of the phylogenetic tree . During the 18th century, several scholars noticed parallels between Tibetan and Burmese, both languages with extensive literary traditions. In the following century, Brian Houghton Hodgson collected a wealth of data on the non-literary languages of the Himalayas and northeast India, noting that many of these were related to Tibetan and Burmese. Others identified related languages in

558-521: A lingua franca or common language of culture among people who used differing dialects in North India, used at the time of the Buddha and employed by him. Another scholar states that at that time it was "a refined and elegant vernacular of all Aryan-speaking people". Modern scholarship has not arrived at a consensus on the issue; there are a variety of conflicting theories with supporters and detractors. After

651-444: A voiced retroflex lateral approximant [ɭ] or non-retroflex [l] "l" sound. Both the long ā and retroflex ḷ are seen in the ISO 15919 / ALA-LC rendering, Pāḷi ; however, to this day there is no single, standard spelling of the term, and all four possible spellings can be found in textbooks. R. C. Childers translates the word as "series" and states that the language "bears

744-650: A continuation of a language spoken in the area of Magadha in the time of the Buddha. Nearly every word in Pāḷi has cognates in the other Middle Indo-Aryan languages, the Prakrits . The relationship to Vedic Sanskrit is less direct and more complicated; the Prakrits were descended from Old Indo-Aryan vernaculars . Historically, influence between Pali and Sanskrit has been felt in both directions. The Pali language's resemblance to Sanskrit

837-547: A degraded form of Pali, But Masefield states that further examination of a very considerable corpus of texts will probably show that this is an internally consistent Pali dialect. The reason for the changes is that some combinations of characters are difficult to write in those scripts. Masefield further states that upon the third re-introduction of Theravada Buddhism into Sri Lanka (The Siyamese Sect), records in Thailand state that large number of texts were also taken. It seems that when

930-567: A few loan-words from local languages where Pali was used (e.g. Sri Lankans adding Sinhala words to Pali). These usages differentiate the Pali found in the Suttapiṭaka from later compositions such as the Pali commentaries on the canon and folklore (e.g., commentaries on the Jataka tales ), and comparative study (and dating) of texts on the basis of such loan-words is now a specialized field unto itself. Pali

1023-643: A high degree of mutual intelligibility. Theravada tradition, as recorded in chronicles like the Mahavamsa , states that the Tipitaka was first committed to writing during the first century BCE. This move away from the previous tradition of oral preservation is described as being motivated by threats to the Sangha from famine, war, and the growing influence of the rival tradition of the Abhayagiri Vihara . This account

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1116-566: A long period, leaving their affiliations difficult to determine. The grouping of the Bai language , with one million speakers in Yunnan, is particularly controversial, with some workers suggesting that it is a sister language to Chinese. The Naxi language of northern Yunnan is usually included in Lolo-Burmese, though other scholars prefer to leave it unclassified. The hills of northwestern Sichuan are home to

1209-488: A mix of several Prakrit languages from around the 3rd century BCE, combined and partially Sanskritized. There is no attested dialect of Middle Indo-Aryan with all the features of Pali. In the modern era, it has been possible to compare Pali with inscriptions known to be in Magadhi Prakrit, as well as other texts and grammars of that language. While none of the existing sources specifically document pre-Ashokan Magadhi,

1302-415: A number of similarities between surviving fragments and Pali morphology. Ardhamagadhi Prakrit was a Middle Indo-Aryan language and a Dramatic Prakrit thought to have been spoken in modern-day Bihar & Eastern Uttar Pradesh and used in some early Buddhist and Jain drama. It was originally thought to be a predecessor of the vernacular Magadhi Prakrit, hence the name (literally "half-Magadhi"). Ardhamāgadhī

1395-580: A valid subgroup in its own right. Most of the Tibeto-Burman languages are spoken in remote mountain areas, which has hampered their study. Many lack a written standard. It is generally easier to identify a language as Tibeto-Burman than to determine its precise relationship with other languages of the group. The subgroupings that have been established with certainty number several dozen, ranging from well-studied groups of dozens of languages with millions of speakers to several isolates , some only discovered in

1488-576: Is Burmese , the national language of Myanmar, with over 32 million speakers and a literary tradition dating from the early 12th century. It is one of the Lolo-Burmese languages , an intensively studied and well-defined group comprising approximately 100 languages spoken in Myanmar and the highlands of Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, and southwest China . Major languages include the Loloish languages , with two million speakers in western Sichuan and northern Yunnan ,

1581-672: Is a classical Middle Indo-Aryan language on the Indian subcontinent . It is widely studied because it is the language of the Buddhist Pāli Canon or Tipiṭaka as well as the sacred language of Theravāda Buddhism . Pali is designated as a classical language by the Government of India . The word 'Pali' is used as a name for the language of the Theravada canon. The word seems to have its origins in commentarial traditions, wherein

1674-591: Is an extensive literature in Classical Tibetan dating from the 8th century. The Tibetic languages are usually grouped with the smaller East Bodish languages of Bhutan and Arunachal Pradesh as the Bodish group. Many diverse Tibeto-Burman languages are spoken on the southern slopes of the Himalayas. Sizable groups that have been identified are the West Himalayish languages of Himachal Pradesh and western Nepal,

1767-494: Is central to the family in that it contains features of many of the other branches, and is also located around the center of the Tibeto-Burman-speaking area. Since Benedict (1972), many languages previously inadequately documented have received more attention with the publication of new grammars, dictionaries, and wordlists. This new research has greatly benefited comparative work, and Bradley (2002) incorporates much of

1860-563: Is currently relatively little known, particularly in the Thai tradition, with many manuscripts never catalogued or published. Paiśācī is a largely unattested literary language of classical India that is mentioned in Prakrit and Sanskrit grammars of antiquity. It is found grouped with the Prakrit languages, with which it shares some linguistic similarities, but was not considered a spoken language by

1953-1004: Is dominated by Indic languages . Some languages firmly belong to one or the other. For example, the Munda and Khasi branches of Austroasiatic languages , the Tibeto-Burman languages of Eastern Nepal , and much of the " Kamarupan " group of Tibeto-Burman, which most notably includes the Meitei (Manipuri), are Indospheric; while the Hmong–Mien family, the Kam–Sui branch of Kadai , the Loloish branch of Tibeto-Burman, and Vietnamese (Viet–Muong) are Sinospheric. Some other languages, like Thai and Tibetan , have been influenced by both Chinese and Indian languages at different historical periods. Still, other linguistic communities are so remote geographically that they have escaped significant influence from either. For example,

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2046-527: Is frequently chanted in a ritual context. The secular literature of Pali historical chronicles, medical texts, and inscriptions is also of great historical importance. The great centres of Pali learning remain in Sri Lanka and other Theravada nations of Southeast Asia: Myanmar , Thailand , Laos and Cambodia . Since the 19th century, various societies for the revival of Pali studies in India have promoted awareness of

2139-496: Is generally accepted by scholars, though there are indications that Pali had already begun to be recorded in writing by this date. By this point in its history, scholars consider it likely that Pali had already undergone some initial assimilation with Sanskrit , such as the conversion of the Middle-Indic bahmana to the more familiar Sanskrit brāhmana that contemporary brahmans used to identify themselves. In Sri Lanka, Pali

2232-630: Is known from inscriptions using a variant of the Gupta script . The Tangut language of the 12th century Western Xia of northern China is preserved in numerous texts written in the Chinese-inspired Tangut script . Over eight million people in the Tibetan Plateau and neighbouring areas in Baltistan , Ladakh , Nepal , Sikkim and Bhutan speak one of several related Tibetic languages . There

2325-448: Is now accepted by most linguists, with a few exceptions such as Roy Andrew Miller and Christopher Beckwith . More recent controversy has centred on the proposed primary branching of Sino-Tibetan into Chinese and Tibeto-Burman subgroups. In spite of the popularity of this classification, first proposed by Kuhn and Conrady, and also promoted by Paul Benedict (1972) and later James Matisoff , Tibeto-Burman has not been demonstrated to be

2418-660: Is often exaggerated by comparing it to later Sanskrit compositions—which were written centuries after Sanskrit ceased to be a living language, and are influenced by developments in Middle Indic , including the direct borrowing of a portion of the Middle Indic lexicon; whereas, a good deal of later Pali technical terminology has been borrowed from the vocabulary of equivalent disciplines in Sanskrit, either directly or with certain phonological adaptations. Post-canonical Pali also possesses

2511-436: Is sometimes substituted with tanti , meaning a string or lineage. This name seems to have emerged in Sri Lanka early in the second millennium CE during a resurgence in the use of Pali as a courtly and literary language. As such, the name of the language has caused some debate among scholars of all ages; the spelling of the name also varies, being found with both long "ā" [ɑː] and short "a" [a] , and also with either

2604-495: Is spoken in an area from eastern Nepal to western Bhutan. Most of the languages of Bhutan are Bodish, but it also has three small isolates, 'Ole ("Black Mountain Monpa"), Lhokpu and Gongduk and a larger community of speakers of Tshangla . The Tani languages include most of the Tibeto-Burman languages of Arunachal Pradesh and adjacent areas of Tibet. The remaining languages of Arunachal Pradesh are much more diverse, belonging to

2697-930: Is that literature in Paiśācī is fragmentary and extremely rare but may once have been common. The 13th-century Tibetan historian Buton Rinchen Drub wrote that the early Buddhist schools were separated by choice of sacred language : the Mahāsāṃghikas used Prakrit, the Sarvāstivādins used Sanskrit, the Sthaviravādins used Paiśācī, and the Saṃmitīya used Apabhraṃśa . This observation has led some scholars to theorize connections between Pali and Paiśācī; Sten Konow concluded that it may have been an Indo-Aryan language spoken by Dravidian people in South India, and Alfred Master noted

2790-460: Is then divided into several branches, some of them geographic conveniences rather than linguistic proposals: Matisoff makes no claim that the families in the Kamarupan or Himalayish branches have a special relationship to one another other than a geographic one. They are intended rather as categories of convenience pending more detailed comparative work. Matisoff also notes that Jingpho–Nungish–Luish

2883-512: Is thought to have entered into a period of decline ending around the 4th or 5th century (as Sanskrit rose in prominence, and simultaneously, as Buddhism's adherents became a smaller portion of the subcontinent), but ultimately survived. The work of Buddhaghosa was largely responsible for its reemergence as an important scholarly language in Buddhist thought. The Visuddhimagga , and the other commentaries that Buddhaghosa compiled, codified and condensed

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2976-746: Is usually divided into canonical and non-canonical or extra-canonical texts. Canonical texts include the whole of the Pali Canon or Tipitaka . With the exception of three books placed in the Khuddaka Nikaya by only the Burmese tradition, these texts (consisting of the five Nikayas of the Sutta Pitaka , the Vinaya Pitaka , and the books of the Abhidhamma Pitaka ) are traditionally accepted as containing

3069-480: The Pāli (in the sense of the line of original text quoted) was distinguished from the commentary or vernacular translation that followed it in the manuscript. K. R. Norman suggests that its emergence was based on a misunderstanding of the compound pāli-bhāsa , with pāli being interpreted as the name of a particular language. The name Pali does not appear in the canonical literature, and in commentary literature

3162-540: The Linguistic Survey of India was devoted to the Tibeto-Burman languages of British India . Julius Klaproth had noted in 1823 that Burmese, Tibetan and Chinese all shared common basic vocabulary , but that Thai , Mon and Vietnamese were quite different. Several authors, including Ernst Kuhn in 1883 and August Conrady in 1896, described an "Indo-Chinese" family consisting of two branches, Tibeto-Burman and Chinese-Siamese. The Tai languages were included on

3255-628: The Akha language and Hani languages , with two million speakers in southern Yunnan, eastern Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam, and Lisu and Lahu in Yunnan, northern Myanmar and northern Thailand. All languages of the Loloish subgroup show significant Austroasiatic influence. The Pai-lang songs, transcribed in Chinese characters in the 1st century, appear to record words from a Lolo-Burmese language, but arranged in Chinese order. The Tibeto-Burman languages of south-west China have been heavily influenced by Chinese over

3348-660: The Aslian branch of Mon–Khmer in Malaya , or the Nicobarese branch of Mon–Khmer in the Nicobar Islands of the Indian Ocean shows little influence by Sinosphere or Indosphere. The Bodish languages and Kham languages are characterized by hybrid prosodic properties akin to related Indospheric languages towards the west and also Sinospheric languages towards the east. Some languages of

3441-649: The Jingpho–Luish languages , including Jingpho with nearly a million speakers. The Brahmaputran or Sal languages include at least the Boro–Garo and Konyak languages , spoken in an area stretching from northern Myanmar through the Indian states of Nagaland , Meghalaya , and Tripura , and are often considered to include the Jingpho–Luish group. The border highlands of Nagaland , Manipur and western Myanmar are home to

3534-538: The Kiranti group of Nepal. This diversity is partly to be explained in terms of areal influences from Chinese on the one hand and Indo-Aryan languages on the other. Matisoff proposed two large and overlapping areas combining cultural and linguistic features – the "Sinosphere" and the "Indosphere", influenced by China and India respectively. A buffer zone between them as a third group was proposed by Kristine A. Hildebrandt, followed by B. Bickel and J. Nichols. The Indosphere

3627-727: The Kiranti group in the Indosphere rank among the morphologically most complex languages of Asia. Indian cultural, intellectual, and political influence – especially that of Pallava writing system – began to penetrate both insular and peninsular Southeast Asia about 2000 years ago. Indic writing systems were adopted first by Austronesians , like Javanese and Cham , and Austroasiatics , like Khmer and Mon , then by Tai ( Siamese and Lao ) and Tibeto-Burmans ( Pyu , Burmese , and Karen ). Indospheric languages are also found in Mainland Southeast Asia (MSEA), defined as

3720-710: The Mahāsāṃghika branch became influential in Central and East India . Akira Hirakawa and Paul Groner also associate Pali with Western India and the Sthavira nikāya, citing the Saurashtran inscriptions, which are linguistically closest to the Pali language. Although Sanskrit was said in the Brahmanical tradition to be the unchanging language spoken by the gods in which each word had an inherent significance, such views for any language

3813-757: The Milindapanha ) may have been composed in India before being transmitted to Sri Lanka, but the surviving versions of the texts are those preserved by the Mahavihara in Ceylon and shared with monasteries in Theravada Southeast Asia. The earliest inscriptions in Pali found in mainland Southeast Asia are from the first millennium CE, some possibly dating to as early as the 4th century. Inscriptions are found in what are now Burma, Laos, Thailand and Cambodia and may have spread from southern India rather than Sri Lanka. By

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3906-561: The Pali Canon and non-canonical texts, and include several examples of the Ye dhamma hetu verse. The oldest surviving Pali manuscript was discovered in Nepal dating to the 9th century. It is in the form of four palm-leaf folios, using a transitional script deriving from the Gupta script to scribe a fragment of the Cullavagga . The oldest known manuscripts from Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia date to

3999-473: The Songlin and Chamdo languages , both of which were only described in the 2010s. New Tibeto-Burman languages continue to be recognized, some not closely related to other languages. Distinct languages only recognized in the 2010s include Koki Naga . Randy LaPolla (2003) proposed a Rung branch of Tibeto-Burman, based on morphological evidence, but this is not widely accepted. Scott DeLancey (2015) proposed

4092-610: The Tamangic languages of western Nepal, including Tamang with one million speakers, and the Kiranti languages of eastern Nepal. The remaining groups are small, with several isolates. The Newar language (Nepal Bhasa) of central Nepal has a million speakers and literature dating from the 12th century, and nearly a million people speak Magaric languages , but the rest have small speech communities. Other isolates and small groups in Nepal are Dura , Raji–Raute , Chepangic and Dhimalish . Lepcha

4185-420: The "Indosphere" ( South Asia and Southeast Asia ) tend to be more agglutinative, with polysyllabic structures, extensive case and verb morphology, and detailed markings of interpropositional relationships. Manange (like other Tamangic languages ) is an interesting case to examine in this regard, as geographically it fits squarely in the "Indospheric" Himalayas, but typologically it shares more features with

4278-572: The "Sinospheric" languages. Tibeto-Burman languages spoken in the Sinosphere tend to be more isolating, while those spoken in the Indosphere tend to be more morphologically complex. Many languages in the western side of the Sino-Tibetan family , which includes the Tibeto-Burman languages, show significant typological resemblances with other languages of South Asia , which puts them in the group of Indosphere. They often have heavier syllables than found in

4371-484: The 11th century, a so-called "Pali renaissance" began in the vicinity of Pagan , gradually spreading to the rest of mainland Southeast Asia as royal dynasties sponsored monastic lineages derived from the Mahavihara of Anuradhapura . This era was also characterized by the adoption of Sanskrit conventions and poetic forms (such as kavya ) that had not been features of earlier Pali literature. This process began as early as

4464-470: The 12th and 7th centuries respectively. Most of the other languages are spoken by much smaller communities, and many of them have not been described in detail. Though the division of Sino-Tibetan into Sinitic and Tibeto-Burman branches (e.g. Benedict, Matisoff) is widely used, some historical linguists criticize this classification, as the non-Sinitic Sino-Tibetan languages lack any shared innovations in phonology or morphology to show that they comprise

4557-791: The 13th–15th century, with few surviving examples. Very few manuscripts older than 400 years have survived, and complete manuscripts of the four Nikayas are only available in examples from the 17th century and later. Pali was first mentioned in Western literature in Simon de la Loubère 's descriptions of his travels in the kingdom of Siam. An early grammar and dictionary was published by Methodist missionary Benjamin Clough in 1824, and an initial study published by Eugène Burnouf and Christian Lassen in 1826 ( Essai sur le Pali, ou Langue sacrée de la presqu'île au-delà du Gange ). The first modern Pali-English dictionary

4650-460: The 21st century but in danger of extinction. These subgroups are here surveyed on a geographical basis. The southernmost group is the Karen languages , spoken by three million people on both sides of the Burma–Thailand border. They differ from all other Tibeto-Burman languages (except Bai) in having a subject–verb–object word order, attributed to contact with Tai–Kadai and Austroasiatic languages . The most widely spoken Tibeto-Burman language

4743-493: The 5th century, but intensified early in the second millennium as Pali texts on poetics and composition modeled on Sanskrit forms began to grow in popularity. One milestone of this period was the publication of the Subodhalankara during the 14th century, a work attributed to Sangharakkhita Mahāsāmi and modeled on the Sanskrit Kavyadarsa . Peter Masefield devoted considerable research to a form of Pali known as Indochinese Pali or 'Kham Pali'. Up until now, this has been considered

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4836-422: The Buddha used during his life. In the 19th century, the British Orientalist Robert Caesar Childers argued that the true or geographical name of the Pali language was Magadhi Prakrit , and that because pāḷi means "line, row, series", the early Buddhists extended the meaning of the term to mean "a series of books", so pāḷibhāsā means "language of the texts". However, modern scholarship has regarded Pali as

4929-446: The Himalayan region. Tibetan has used Ranjana writing since 600 AD, but has preferred to calque new religious and technical vocabulary from native morphemes rather than borrowing Indian ones. Languages in the "Sinosphere" ( East Asia and North Vietnam) tend to be analytic, with little morphology, monosyllabic or sesquisyllabic lexical structures, extensive compounding, complex tonal systems, and serial verb constructions. Languages in

5022-458: The Indosphere typically display retroflex stop consonants , postsentential relative clauses and the extended grammaticalization of the verb say . In Indospheric languages, such as the Tibeto-Burman languages of Northeast India and Nepal, for example, the development of relative pronouns and correlative structures as well as of retroflex initial consonants is often found. Tibeto-Burman languages The Tibeto-Burman languages are

5115-450: The Pali language as " Magadhan " or the "language of Magadha". This identification first appears in the commentaries, and may have been an attempt by Buddhists to associate themselves more closely with the Maurya Empire . However, only some of the Buddha's teachings were delivered in the historical territory of Magadha kingdom . Scholars consider it likely that he taught in several closely related dialects of Middle Indo-Aryan, which had

5208-445: The Prakrits." According to K. R. Norman , differences between different texts within the canon suggest that it contains material from more than a single dialect. He also suggests it is likely that the viharas in North India had separate collections of material, preserved in the local dialect. In the early period it is likely that no degree of translation was necessary in communicating this material to other areas. Around

5301-467: The Sinhala commentarial tradition that had been preserved and expanded in Sri Lanka since the 3rd century BCE. With only a few possible exceptions, the entire corpus of Pali texts known today is believed to derive from the Anuradhapura Maha Viharaya in Sri Lanka. While literary evidence exists of Theravadins in mainland India surviving into the 13th century, no Pali texts specifically attributable to this tradition have been recovered. Some texts (such as

5394-399: The Sri Lankan tradition and then spread to other Theravada regions, some texts may have other origins. The Milinda Panha may have originated in northern India before being translated from Sanskrit or Gandhari Prakrit . There are also a number of texts that are believed to have been composed in Pali in Sri Lanka, Thailand and Burma but were not widely circulated. This regional Pali literature

5487-422: The UK; incongruously, the citizens of the UK were not nearly so robust in Sanskrit and Prakrit language studies as Germany, Russia, and even Denmark . Even without the inspiration of colonial holdings such as the former British occupation of Sri Lanka and Burma, institutions such as the Danish Royal Library have built up major collections of Pali manuscripts, and major traditions of Pali studies. Pali literature

5580-562: The available sources suggest that Pali is not equatable with that language. Modern scholars generally regard Pali to have originated from a western dialect, rather than an eastern one. Pali has some commonalities with both the western Ashokan Edicts at Girnar in Saurashtra , and the Central-Western Prakrit found in the eastern Hathigumpha inscription . These similarities lead scholars to associate Pali with this region of western India. Nonetheless, Pali does retain some eastern features that have been referred to as Māgadhisms . Pāḷi, as

5673-456: The basis of vocabulary and typological features shared with Chinese. Jean Przyluski introduced the term sino-tibétain (Sino-Tibetan) as the title of his chapter on the group in Antoine Meillet and Marcel Cohen 's Les Langues du Monde in 1924. The Tai languages have not been included in most Western accounts of Sino-Tibetan since the Second World War, though many Chinese linguists still include them. The link between Tibeto-Burman and Chinese

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5766-418: The bite of snakes. Many people in Theravada cultures still believe that taking a vow in Pali has a special significance, and, as one example of the supernatural power assigned to chanting in the language, the recitation of the vows of Aṅgulimāla are believed to alleviate the pain of childbirth in Sri Lanka. In Thailand, the chanting of a portion of the Abhidhammapiṭaka is believed to be beneficial to

5859-399: The classification of Sino-Tibetan and Tibeto-Burman languages, Shafer (1955) and Benedict (1972) , which were actually produced in the 1930s and 1940s respectively. Shafer's tentative classification took an agnostic position and did not recognize Tibeto-Burman, but placed Chinese (Sinitic) on the same level as the other branches of a Sino-Tibetan family. He retained Tai–Kadai (Daic) within

5952-423: The death of the Buddha, Pali may have evolved among Buddhists out of the language of the Buddha as a new artificial language. R. C. Childers, who held to the theory that Pali was Old Magadhi, wrote: "Had Gautama never preached, it is unlikely that Magadhese would have been distinguished from the many other vernaculars of Hindustan, except perhaps by an inherent grace and strength which make it a sort of Tuscan among

6045-441: The early grammarians because it was understood to have been purely a literary language. In works of Sanskrit poetics such as Daṇḍin 's Kavyadarsha , it is also known by the name of Bhūtabhāṣā , an epithet which can be interpreted as 'dead language' (i.e., with no surviving speakers), or bhūta means past and bhāṣā means language i.e. 'a language spoken in the past'. Evidence which lends support to this interpretation

6138-448: The east, while tone systems , though attested, are not as frequent. Indospheric languages are often toneless and/or highly suffixal . Often there is considerable inflectional morphology, from fully developed case marking systems to extensive pronominal morphology found on the verb. These languages generally mark a number of types of inter-casual relationships and have distinct construction involving verbal auxiliaries . Languages of

6231-410: The epithet in consequence of the perfection of its grammatical structure". There is persistent confusion as to the relation of Pāḷi to the vernacular spoken in the ancient kingdom of Magadha , which was located in modern-day Bihar . Beginning in the Theravada commentaries, Pali was identified with ' Magadhi ', the language of the kingdom of Magadha, and this was taken to also be the language that

6324-415: The family, allegedly at the insistence of colleagues, despite his personal belief that they were not related. A very influential, although also tentative, classification is that of Benedict (1972) , which was actually written around 1941. Like Shafer's work, this drew on the data assembled by the Sino-Tibetan Philology Project, which was directed by Shafer and Benedict in turn. Benedict envisaged Chinese as

6417-416: The first family to branch off, followed by Karen. The Tibeto-Burman family is then divided into seven primary branches: James Matisoff proposes a modification of Benedict that demoted Karen but kept the divergent position of Sinitic. Of the 7 branches within Tibeto-Burman, 2 branches (Baic and Karenic) have SVO -order languages, whereas all the other 5 branches have SOV -order languages. Tibeto-Burman

6510-420: The highlands of Southeast Asia and south-west China. The name "Tibeto-Burman" was first applied to this group in 1856 by James Logan , who added Karen in 1858. Charles Forbes viewed the family as uniting the Gangetic and Lohitic branches of Max Müller 's Turanian , a huge family consisting of all the Eurasian languages except the Semitic , "Aryan" ( Indo-European ) and Chinese languages. The third volume of

6603-408: The language and its literature, including the Maha Bodhi Society founded by Anagarika Dhammapala . In Europe, the Pali Text Society has been a major force in promoting the study of Pali by Western scholars since its founding in 1881. Based in the United Kingdom, the society publishes romanized Pali editions, along with many English translations of these sources. In 1869, the first Pali Dictionary

6696-454: The language underwent a small degree of Sanskritisation (i.e., MIA bamhana > brahmana, tta > tva in some cases). Bhikkhu Bodhi , summarizing the current state of scholarship, states that the language is "closely related to the language (or, more likely, the various regional dialects) that the Buddha himself spoke". He goes on to write: Scholars regard this language as a hybrid showing features of several Prakrit dialects used around

6789-711: The monastic ordination died out in Sri Lanka, many texts were lost also. Therefore the Sri Lankan Pali canon had been translated first into Indo-Chinese Pali, and then back again into Pali. Despite an expansion of the number and influence of Mahavihara-derived monastics, this resurgence of Pali study resulted in no production of any new surviving literary works in Pali. During this era, correspondences between royal courts in Sri Lanka and mainland Southeast Asia were conducted in Pali, and grammars aimed at speakers of Sinhala, Burmese, and other languages were produced. The emergence of

6882-512: The natural language, the root language of all beings. Comparable to Ancient Egyptian , Latin or Hebrew in the mystic traditions of the West , Pali recitations were often thought to have a supernatural power (which could be attributed to their meaning, the character of the reciter, or the qualities of the language itself), and in the early strata of Buddhist literature we can already see Pali dhāraṇī s used as charms, as, for example, against

6975-551: The newer data. George van Driem rejects the primary split of Sinitic, making Tibeto-Burman synonymous with Sino-Tibetan. The internal structure of Tibeto-Burman is tentatively classified as follows by Matisoff (2015: xxxii, 1123–1127) in the final release of the Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus (STEDT). The classification of Tujia is difficult due to extensive borrowing. Other unclassified Tibeto-Burman languages include Basum and

7068-526: The non- Sinitic members of the Sino-Tibetan language family , over 400 of which are spoken throughout the Southeast Asian Massif ("Zomia") as well as parts of East Asia and South Asia . Around 60 million people speak Tibeto-Burman languages. The name derives from the most widely spoken of these languages, Burmese and the Tibetic languages , which also have extensive literary traditions, dating from

7161-401: The recently departed, and this ceremony routinely occupies as much as seven working days. There is nothing in the latter text that relates to this subject, and the origins of the custom are unclear. Pali died out as a literary language in mainland India in the fourteenth century but survived elsewhere until the eighteenth. Today Pali is studied mainly to gain access to Buddhist scriptures, and

7254-550: The region encompassing Laos , Cambodia , and Thailand , as well as parts of Burma , Peninsular Malaysia and Vietnam . Related scripts are also found in South East Asian islands ranging from Sumatra , Java , Bali , south Sulawesi and most of the Philippines . The learned components of the vocabularies of Khmer, Mon, Burmese and Thai/Lao consist of words of Pali or Sanskrit origin. Indian influence also spread north to

7347-466: The short variants occur only in closed syllables, the long variants occur only in open syllables. Short and long e and o are therefore not distinct phonemes. e and o are long in an open syllable: at the end of a syllable as in [ne-tum̩] เนตุํ 'to lead' or [so-tum̩] โสตุํ 'to hear'. They are short in a closed syllable: when followed by a consonant with which they make a syllable as in [upek-khā] 'indifference' or [sot-thi] 'safety'. e appears for

7440-658: The small Ao , Angami–Pochuri , Tangkhulic , and Zeme groups of languages, as well as the Karbi language . Meithei , the main language of Manipur with 1.4 million speakers, is sometimes linked with the 50 or so Kuki-Chin languages are spoken in Mizoram and the Chin State of Myanmar. The Mru language is spoken by a small group in the Chittagong Hill Tracts between Bangladesh and Myanmar. There have been two milestones in

7533-461: The small Qiangic and Rgyalrongic groups of languages, which preserve many archaic features. The most easterly Tibeto-Burman language is Tujia , spoken in the Wuling Mountains on the borders of Hunan, Hubei, Guizhou and Chongqing. Two historical languages are believed to be Tibeto-Burman, but their precise affiliation is uncertain. The Pyu language of central Myanmar in the first centuries

7626-481: The small Siangic , Kho-Bwa (or Kamengic), Hruso , Miju and Digaro languages (or Mishmic) groups. These groups have relatively little Tibeto-Burman vocabulary, and Bench and Post dispute their inclusion in Sino-Tibetan. The greatest variety of languages and subgroups is found in the highlands stretching from northern Myanmar to northeast India. Northern Myanmar is home to the small Nungish group, as well as

7719-506: The subtle nuances of that thought-world. According to A. K. Warder , the Pali language is a Prakrit language used in a region of Western India . Warder associates Pali with the Indian realm ( janapada ) of Avanti , where the Sthavira nikāya was centered. Following the initial split in the Buddhist community , the Sthavira nikāya became influential in Western and South India while

7812-479: The term 'Pali' as the name of the language of the Theravada canon also occurred during this era. While Pali is generally recognized as an ancient language, no epigraphical or manuscript evidence has survived from the earliest eras. The earliest samples of Pali discovered are inscriptions believed to date from 5th to 8th century located in mainland Southeast Asia, specifically central Siam and lower Burma . These inscriptions typically consist of short excerpts from

7905-429: The third century BCE, subjected to a partial process of Sanskritization. While the language is not identical to what Buddha himself would have spoken, it belongs to the same broad language family as those he might have used and originates from the same conceptual matrix. This language thus reflects the thought-world that the Buddha inherited from the wider Indian culture into which he was born, so that its words capture

7998-425: The time of Ashoka there had been more linguistic divergence, and an attempt was made to assemble all the material. It is possible that a language quite close to the Pali of the canon emerged as a result of this process as a compromise of the various dialects in which the earliest material had been preserved, and this language functioned as a lingua franca among Eastern Buddhists from then on. Following this period,

8091-446: The words of the Buddha and his immediate disciples by the Theravada tradition. Extra-canonical texts can be divided into several categories: Other types of texts present in Pali literature include works on grammar and poetics, medical texts, astrological and divination texts, cosmologies, and anthologies or collections of material from the canonical literature. While the majority of works in Pali are believed to have originated with

8184-600: Was not exclusively used to convey the teachings of the Buddha, as can be deduced from the existence of a number of secular texts, such as books of medical science/instruction, in Pali. However, scholarly interest in the language has been focused upon religious and philosophical literature, because of the unique window it opens on one phase in the development of Buddhism . Vowels may be divided in two different ways: Long and short vowels are only contrastive in open syllables; in closed syllables, all vowels are always short. Short and long e and o are in complementary distribution:

8277-421: Was not shared in the early Buddhist traditions, in which words were only conventional and mutable signs. This view of language naturally extended to Pali and may have contributed to its usage (as an approximation or standardization of local Middle Indic dialects) in place of Sanskrit. However, by the time of the compilation of the Pali commentaries (4th or 5th century), Pali was described by the anonymous authors as

8370-570: Was prominently used by Jain scholars and is preserved in the Jain Agamas. Ardhamagadhi Prakrit differs from later Magadhi Prakrit in similar ways to Pali, and was often believed to be connected with Pali on the basis of the belief that Pali recorded the speech of the Buddha in an early Magadhi dialect. Magadhi Prakrit was a Middle Indic language spoken in present-day Bihar, and eastern Uttar Pradesh. Its use later expanded southeast to include some regions of modern-day Bengal, Odisha, and Assam, and it

8463-565: Was published by Robert Childers in 1872 and 1875. Following the foundation of the Pali Text Society , English Pali studies grew rapidly and Childer's dictionary became outdated. Planning for a new dictionary began in the early 1900s, but delays (including the outbreak of World War I) meant that work was not completed until 1925. T. W. Rhys Davids in his book Buddhist India , and Wilhelm Geiger in his book Pāli Literature and Language , suggested that Pali may have originated as

8556-574: Was published using the research of Robert Caesar Childers, one of the founding members of the Pali Text Society. It was the first Pali translated text in English and was published in 1872. Childers' dictionary later received the Volney Prize in 1876. The Pali Text Society was founded in part to compensate for the very low level of funds allocated to Indology in late 19th-century England and the rest of

8649-431: Was used in some Prakrit dramas to represent vernacular dialogue. Preserved examples of Magadhi Prakrit are from several centuries after the theorized lifetime of the Buddha, and include inscriptions attributed to Asoka Maurya . Differences observed between preserved examples of Magadhi Prakrit and Pali lead scholars to conclude that Pali represented a development of a northwestern dialect of Middle Indic, rather than being

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