The Pāli Language
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The liturgical language of Theravada Buddhism and the only Indic language to preserve a complete Tipiṭaka.
Three folios of Pāli from the Wellcome Library are set on display to show three styles of writing the Burmese script: square, round, and bold. (CC BY 4.0)
Table of Contents
Books (9)
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A thorough translation of DN 31, giving a word-by-word gloss suitable for use as a language-learning tool.
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Canonical Works (2)
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What is this hullabaloo to you?
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Readings (25)
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Pali has the expected features of a natural standard language and can be seen as a precursor of Epigraphic Prakrit.
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If attention is given instead to Salomon’s ‘central-western epigraphic Prakrit’, it can be seen as a later reflex of Pali by a method of presentation unique to this paper. Accordingly, it should be merged with the existing category of ‘Epigraphic Pali’ and serious attention given to the Theravada tradition that the Buddha spoke Pali.
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On the linguistic history of the Pāli Language.
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The fact that there are so many scripts is hardly a pretext for learning none of them.
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although the Buddha took over some of the terminology of Brahmanical Hinduism, he gave it a new Buddhist sense. The change of meaning is almost always a result of the fact that the Brahmanical terms were used in a framework of ritualism, while the Buddha invested them with a moral and ethical sense.
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… what we have is the product of centuries of careful copying, careless copying, knowledge, incompetence, inspired emendation and bungling. And none of that stopped with the beginning of Western scholarship.
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… external sandhi in Pali consists of a series of contractions of final vowels with the initial vowels of following words, or the loss of the nasalisation and the contraction of the vowel remaining
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The wonder is not that these intuitive translators were sometimes incorrect, but that they were correct so often.
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A handy list of the suffixes you’ll find at the end of Pāḷi words.
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At an early stage during the formation of Pāli, genuine Middle Indic forms began to be converted into artificial words under the growing influence of Sanskrit on Buddhist Middle Indic.
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We do not have any definite information
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Can pāḷi be derived from pāṭhya?
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The one they chose was perfectly correct, but it was only part of the translation.
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Audio/Video (3)
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Nearly a thousand Pāli words recorded by a professor of South Asian phonetics.
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A few dozen Pāḷi terms clearly pronounced to give an idea of its sound.
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Reference Shelf (13)
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The full Pāli Canon online in Pāli alongside its traditional commentaries and modern translations. An essential tool for anyone working on translating the Pāli Canon.
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A dictionary file of common Pāli terms for the Android GBoard based on the Access to Insight Glossary.
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… from the frequency-sorted word list from Schmidt’s dictionary and the definitions & parts of speech from Sutta Central’s copy of the Concise Pali-English Dictionary.
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A set of keybindings for Linux distros using the X.org system which makes Pāli easier to type.
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Two keyboard shortcut programs for Windows making “Pāḷi” easier to type.
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The Pāli Language has been written in many different scripts over the years: Thai, Lao, and even Roman. This helpful tool will automatically convert Pāli (or Sanskrit) text between any two scripts.
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A table comparing how Bhante Sujato and Bhikkhu Bodhi translate a variety of Pāli terms.
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An extremely concise reference sheet for reading early Pāli.
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Related Topics (5)
Supertopic
Subtopics (4)
- Pāli Dictionaries
- Pāli Grammar
- The Pāli Language: Level 1 (Course)
- The Pāli Language: Level 2 (Course)