Update: 2004-09-15 01:55 PM -0400
by U Kyaw Tun, M.S. (I.P.S.T., U.S.A.). Not for sale. Prepared for students of TIL Computing and Language Center, Yangon, MYANMAR.
This is a collection from various sources.
In Myanmar, whenever we speak of "language", we usually mean the written form
or the script, but in the West, especially the linguists, mean it to be the
spoken form. This brings in the unsolvable problem of choosing which form, from
which place, spoken by which group of people to represent what we are going to
call the authentic language. Would you say that how the people in Mandalay speak is
the representative form? Are not the forms spoken in Arakan, in Tavoy, and in
Yangon not Bama language? This question of choosing which form becomes
irrelevant if we are to stick to our time-honoured adage:
We shall call the written form Myanmar, and the spoken form Burmese or Bama. In this paper Myanmar means the script and not the spoken form. Yet, people tend to be confused by how a particular word sounds by different peoples who speak Pali.
from: An Elementary Pali Course, by Ven. Narada Thera
Pali (or <Pāḷi> with diacritical marks)
was the language spoken by the Buddha and employed by Him to expound His Doctrine of Deliverance.
Māgadhī
is its real name, it being the dialect of the people of Magadha - a district in
Central India. Pali (literarily: "line" or "text"), is, strictly speaking,
the name for the Buddhist Canon. Nowadays the term Pali is often applied to the language in which
the Buddhist texts or scriptures were written. The Pali language must have had characters of its own,
but at present they are extinct.
UKT:
It is regrettable that some people in the West, especially non-Buddhists, mistakenly take Pali to be the language of Bali, an island in Indonesia, where the majority of population is of Hindu faith.
Pali is written in the script of the land, Myanmar script in Myanmar, Sinhala in Sri Lanka and Thai in Thailand -- the three prominent Buddhist countries where Theravada
school of Buddhism has taken root. However, the Pali in this paper is in Roman script. To make a distinction between various Pali texts, I will designate the text in this paper as English-Pali (E-Pali). It follows the Sinhala-Pali pronunciation. The one that I am familiar with is the Myanmar-Pali (M-Pali). One major difference between E-Pali and M-Pali is the pronunciation of words involving Myanmar characters
{sa.} and
{tha.} which have counter-parts in c and s in English-Pali. e.g.
M-Pali Romabama E-Pali fr. PTS Meaning 
{sé-ta.na} cetanā intention PTS p271 
{thi-la.} sīla character PTS p712 Which pronunciation is more authentic is debatable, since there are claims that before the Aryan (language: Sanskrit) domination of India, people living in the area where the Buddha originated spoke a language(s) which had Tibeto-Burmese roots and therefore Myanmar pronunciation -- Bama being a Tibeto-Burmese language -- should be closer to the original Magadha pronunciation.
http://www.geocities.com/derekacameron/pali.html
Pali means “text.” Pali is the language in which the oldest texts of Buddhism are written. In some senses it is an “artificial” language, in that these texts contain traces of dialects from various geographic regions and various points in time. Nevertheless, we can say that Pali is very close to the language actually spoken by the Buddha.http://vitalog.com/cgi-bin/profile/content.cgi?id=1605
In 1996, an archaeological dig unearthed a "flawless stone" placed there by the Indian Emperor Asoka in 249 BCE to mark the precise location of the Buddha's birth. When Asoka visited Lumbini, the Buddha's birthplace, it was a flourishing village. Asoka constructed four stupas and a stone pillar with a figure of a horse on top. The stone pillar bears an inscription "King Piyadasi (another name for Asoka), beloved of the gods, having being anointed 20 years, came here himself and worshipped saying 'Here Buddha Sakyamuni was born'. ... Buddha was born (ca. 624 BC) in Lumbini, now called Rummindei, not far from Kapilavatthu, Nepal and died (ca. 544 BC) in Kusinara, now called Kushinagar, Uttar Pradesh, India.
In 1895, Feuhrer, a famous German archaeologist, discovered the great pillar while wandering about the foothills of the Churia range. Further exploration and excavation of the surrounding area revealed the existence of a brick temple and a sandstone sculpture within the temple itself depicting scenes of the Buddha's birth.It would be safe to assume that the language Buddha spoke would be the language of the majority of the region. How did it sound like? Was the language an Indo-European language or Tibeto-Burman? Of course, being born into the ruling class it would be safe to assume that he knew the language of the ruling class. Was the ruling class Sanskrit-speaking Indo-Europeans? These questions have no definite answers, and so I would venture to suggest that the Myanmar-Pali pronunciations should have a precedence over the pronunciations of English-Pali.
edited excerpt from Coping with Pali diacritical marks and fonts A Guide to Learning the Pali Language by John Bullit, http://www.accesstoinsight.org/pali/index.html
Alas, there is no standardized method for displaying Pali's accented characters on computer screens.
UKT: To overcome this problem, Myanmars who can read Myanmar script should use Myanmar script. For those who cannot read Myanmar, I suggest they use Romabama which is a one-to-one transliteration of Myanmar. Romabama characters are presented within { }. However, please remember that Romabama is still in the developmental stage, and the transliteration is bound to change from time to time. One of the reasons why I have taken up Pali is to help me develop Romabama, and as my knowledge of E-Pali and M-Pali grows, I would be updating Romabama.
Romabama is for transliteration of Myanmar-Pali (M-Pali).
My intention is to bring out the uniqueness of M-Pali spelling
which is different from that of E-Pali.
Romabama was originally developed to help me write e-mails and web-pages. The intention was to use the qwerty (typewriter keyboard) characters only. However, I have to extend to use all ASCII characters (up to Alt+0255) to accommodate transcriptions for: é (Alt+0233) for Myanmar è (Alt=0232) for Myanmar The possibility of using Roman letters with circumflex for long vowels ā, ī, ū is also being considered: â (Alt+0226) for E-Pali ā (U0101) î (Alt+0238) for E-Pali ī (U012B) û (Alt+0251) for E-Pali ū (U016B)
Over the years, many different methods have been adopted in an attempt to express Pali diacritics using the limited character sets available to personal computers. Some of these strategies are:
• Ignore them altogether. This is the method generally used here at
Access to Insight (although I have used the palatal nasal ñ because it is
easily implemented using HTML). For example, the
first precept
would be written thus:
panatipata veramani sikkha-padam samadiyami.
-- Myanmar
{pa-Na-ti.pa-ta wé-ra.ma.Ni. theik~hka-pa.dan°
tha.ma-di.ya-mi.} -- Romabama-formal
{pâNâtipâtâ wéramaNi theik~hkâpadan°
thamâdi yâmi} -- proposed Romabama-formal
{paNatipata weramaNi theikhkapadan thamadiyami.} -- Romabama-informal
• The Velthuis scheme: double the vowels, punctuate the consonants.
This scheme was originally developed in 1991 by Frans Velthuis for use with his
"devnag" Devanagari font, designed for the TEX typesetting system
(see »http://www.ctan.org/). Pali and
Sanskrit scholars have since adopted it as a standard technique in Internet
correspondence (see, for example, the
»BUDDHA-L discussion group and the
»Journal of Buddhist Ethics).
In the Velthuis scheme two basic rules are observed:
-- Long vowels (those usually typeset with a macron (bar) above them) are
doubled: aa ii uu
-- For consonants, the diacritic mark precedes the letter it affects. Thus, the
retroflex (cerebral) consonants (usually typeset with a dot underneath) are: .r .t .th .d .dh .
-- Myanmar
UKT: Please note that ~ is used in the above transliteration to show the
vertical ligature
(such as
), and ° to show
niggahīta
. Since niggahita is pronounced
in Burmese without
any m- flavour the use of ṁ (or
ṃ or ŋ) as in E-Pali is inappropriate for M-Pali
transliteration. Please note that
I am still waiting for approval by my peers.
• Fake it using HTML. HTML has a few characters that take care of some of the letters OK. For the long vowels you can use some sort of accent:
ä ï ü, à ì ù, â î û etc. The palatal n is straightforward: ñ. Whatever method you adopt, be consistent. Example:• Use capital letters. Capitalized letters represent letters with an
accompanying diacritic. This method is simple, but it has ambiguities (e.g., how
to distinguish between palatal and guttural n?). Example:
pANAtipAtA veramaNI sikkhA-padaM samAdiyAmi.
UKT: As long as you are within one system, or within one book, the problem of
diacritical marks does not arise. However, if you are referencing or using other
books and sources, as I am doing now, you must be careful to note the kind of
system the author is using. For example, I am finding that PTS Dictionary and
Ashin Narada seems to be using different systems.
However, it is well recognized that when you read, you do NOT actually
spell out the words: you recognized them by their "appearance" (such as the first
letter, the length, and certain other characteristics). This "recognition" is
yours alone -- a product of your brain and is bound to be different from mine or
from everyone. Finally, when you become
proficient in a language, you do NOT even read every word in a sentence!
-- UKT
a U0061 / ɑ U0251
ā U0101 / ɑ̄ U0251+U0304 (diacritical sign is known as macron)
The symbol which corresponds to Myanmar
was given as ɑ U0251 in the original Ashin Narada's text , however,
since E-Pali characters are not IPA characters, either a U0061 or ɑ U0251 should be appropriate. However,
there are webpages, such as
http://www.metta.lk/pali-utils/pcourse.html,
which uses Times New Roman font, writing the symbol for
in Times_CSX+ font to make it appear as ɑ U0251. Since the symbol used by
PTS is a U0061,
I am using a U0061 in TIL pages.
-- UKT
I have attempted to study Pali as a language -- not as part of the Theravada
{hterawada} Buddhism -- many times in my life. The first time was in
Myanmar-pyé and the Pali that I learned was the Myanmar Pali (M-Pali). After coming
to Canada, I tried to learn Pali a couple of times on the Internet. Of course it
was the English-Pali (E-Pali), and I could not overcome the problem of the
diacritical-marks. Moreover, since at that time no source in Myanmar-script was
available to me, I had to discontinue after a few days. The most suitable source
for me then, and now, is An Elementary Pali Course, by
Ven. Narada Thera. It is on this and books from the Distance-teaching University
,
(in Myanmar script) that I am relying mostly.
I have prepared my lessons formerly in Tipitaka font. These files which you are reading now
are part of my first attempt to study Pali. I have now changed the font to Arial Unicode MS.
If the IPA character schwa [ ə ] appears on your computer with almost the same shape as
, then be assured
that most of the characters that is displayed on your computer screen is
correct. Even though you are using Arial Unicode MS, there is always a possibility
that what you are seeing may not be the same as what I have intended. This can
be due to the operating system of your computer.
It should be borne in mind that Pali is written in many scripts which would bring about
differences in pronunciation. Which pronunciation is more authentic is debatable. Pali written in
English (the form presented in this paper) which probably was based on Sinhala and Sanskrit has
different pronunciation for some words particularly those involving the Myanmar consonants r2c1
{sa.} and r6c5
{tha.}.
To make the paper more intelligible to a native-Myanmar, I have included Myanmar characters
and their transliterations in Romabama. The Romabama words are displayed within { }.
from: http://www.geocities.com/indoeurop/tree/indo/pali.html
The Buddhist Canon in Sri Lanka is written (see UKT note below) in Pali, so the language is still used as a sacred one in Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. But its homeland is India, and Pali originally was one of western dialects which later acquired certain eastern characteristics. Later together with Buddhism it spread within the South Eastern Asia, and a lot of scientific, religious and literature works were written in it already when it was forgotten in India. There are in fact four kinds of Pali: the Canon Pali, the literature Pali, the commentary Pali and the modern Pali; the last one has got a significant number of local borrowings and peculiarities and is no longer classical.
UKT note: It is statements like the above that usually lead non-linguists astray. Pali is a spoken language, written in the script of the land where it is used: for example in Myanmar-pyé, it is written in Myanmar script. Strictly speaking Myanmar script uses an abugida and not an alphabet.
Phonetics: Pali phonetics is rather simple: 5 simple vowels, no diphthongs and sonant vowels, aspirated and non-aspirated consonants. Pali phonetic laws prohibit the usage of a great number of fricative consonants together, all words end in a vowel.
UKT: The above statement seems to be inconsistent with the usual statement that "the Pali alphabet consists of forty-one letters -- 8 vowels sara
{tha-ra.} , and 33 consonants vyañjana
{byi:~}". This is due to the failure to differentiate between the spoken form of a language and its written form. See PTS p652 on the instability of the semi-vowel vy° .
Nominal Morphology: In morphology the number of vowel interchanges decreased in comparison with Sanskrit; there is a trend of unification of types of noun declension and verb conjugation, and the number of cases is six at maximum.
Verbal Morphology: The verb has only three tenses and two aspects: ancient Indic languages Vedic and Sanskrit used much more of them. The system of syntax is well developed and uses many auxiliary parts of speech in analytical constructions.
Lexicon: Pali is interesting for its vocabulary which is totally unnatural and is created only in order to reflect the ideas of the religion.
Script:
Brahmi script
UKT: The above link is broken. However, you can see what it is like in
TIL Pali Dictionary. See
Devanagari
Close contacts: Languages of the Southeast Asia contributed much to
the "modern" variety of Pali. Of the Indic languages, Pali is rather similar to
Sanskrit.
For more information, see:
•
Indo-European Chronology (Indic)
• The Routes
of Indo-Aryan Migrations (essay including the glossary)
• Links
