Talk:Pali - Misplaced Pages

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Does anyone know the standard abbreviation for Pāli?कुक्कुरोवाच 21:34, 2 Apr 2004 (UTC)

There ain't one http://ftp.ics.uci.edu/pub/ietf/http/related/iso639.txt Shantavira 10:34, 11 Jun 2004 (UTC)

www.accesstoinsight.org is only intended to provide a small selection of Pali texts (see their home page) in English. I would have added a link to the complete canon at www.metta.lk/tipitaka which has almost all the canon in Pali and English (and Burmese) but they seem to be down at the moment (not uncommon). Shantavira 10:34, 11 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Tipitaka link now added Shantavira 10:23, 15 Jul 2004 (UTC)

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)

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)

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/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)

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 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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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).

Pali Misplaced Pages

This article includes a link to Pali Misplaced Pages. 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 Misplaced Pages 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)

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