Pali and Sanskrit: some history

by Dmytro » Fri Jan 08, 2010 5:11 pm

(a recovered and edited E-Sangha post)

An approximate timeline:

1500 BC

OLD INDO-ARYAN

Vedic is the language of the Vedas, the earliest sacred texts of India. The earliest of the Vedas, the Rigveda, was composed in the 2nd millennium BC.

The Vedic is an early descendant of Proto-Indo-Iranian (spoken around 2000 BC), and still comparatively similar (being removed by maybe 1500 years) to the Proto-Indo-European language. Vedic is the oldest attested language of the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European family. It is also still closely related to Avestan, the oldest preserved Iranian language.

600 BC

MIDDLE INDO-ARYAN

Vedic is preserved only in sacred recitation of Vedas. Many dialects have developed, including local dialects, like Magadhi (the language of Magadha region), and dialects of social groups, like Ardha-Magadhi (the language of upper castes in Magadha).

The Ardha-Magadhi is probably used as a ligua franca (language for cultural exchange, commerce and diplomacy) in a wide area of India beyond Magadha.
This language is preserved in Jain texts.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jainism

Buddha probably uses Ardha-Magadhi for preaching.

"Pāli as a MIA language is different from Sanskrit not so much with regard to the time of its origin than as to its dialectal base, since a number of its morphological and lexical features betray the fact that it is not a direct continuation of Ṛgvedic Sanskrit; rather it descends from a dialect (or a number of dialects) which was (/were), despite many similarities, different from Ṛgvedic.[1] Some examples may help to illustrate this point [2]:..."

Pāli: A Grammar of the Language of the Theravāda Tipiṭaka
By Thomas Oberlies
page 6

http://books.google.com/books?id=zFc5_S ... frontcover

500 BC

Probaly the Indian Brahmanists feel the need to counteract the popularity of Buddha's teaching by propagating their knowledge. Indian grammarian Panini begins a project of resurrecting Vedic language (which he calls 'chandaso') in a form that can be widely used, and composes a grammar.

This new language later acquires a name "Sanskrit" ("refined"), and the vernaculars come to be called "Prakrits" ("natural").

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanskrit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prakrit

Still Sanskrit is markedly different from Vedic in grammar and vocabulary.

200 BC

The development of Sanskrit allows to compose a big epic Mahabharata, and thus to propagate the traditional values among lower castes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahabharata

Ardha-Magadhi is no longer spoken.
The language of Theravada canon comes to be known as 'Pali'.
Buddhist grammarians write down the rules of this language.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pali

100 CE

The wave of sanskritization reaches Buddhist scriptures, and Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit develops

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhist_Hybrid_Sanskrit

The buddhist texts previously precerved in vernaculars are converted to Sanskrit.
Mahasanghika texts are an evidence of this stage, being written in partly sanskritized Prakrit.

However in Theravada the texts are preserved as much as possible in original form and not sanskritized.

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Re: Pali and Sanskrit: some history

by Dmytro » Fri Jan 08, 2010 5:12 pm

Thomas Oberlies, 'Aśokan Prakrit and Pali', page 163:

1.1 The Middle Indo-Aryan languages

The Indo-Aryan languages are commonly assigned to three major groups - Old, Middle and New Indo-Aryan -, a linguistic and not strictly chronological classification as the MIA languages are not younger than ('Classical') Sanskrit. And a number of their morphophonological and lexical features betray the fact that they are not direct continuations of Ṛgvedic Sanskrit, the main base of 'Classical' Sanskrit; rather they descend from dialects which, despite many similarities, were different from Ṛgvedic and in some regards even more archaic.

MIA languages, though individually distinct, share features of phonology and morphology which characterize them as parallel descendants of Old Indo-Aryan. Various sound changes are typical of the MIA phonology:

(1) The vocalic liquids 'ṛ' and 'ḷ' are replaced by 'a', 'i' or 'u';
(2) the diptongs 'ai' and 'au' are monophthongized to 'e' and 'o';
(3) long vowels before two or more consonants are shortened;
(4) the three sibilants of OIA are reduced to one, either 'ś' or 's';
(5) the often complex consonant clusters of OIA are reduced to more readily pronounceable forms, either by assimilation or by splitting;
(6) single intervocalic stops are progressively weakened;
(7) dentals are palatalized by a following '-y-';
( 8 ) all final consonants except '-ṃ' are dropped unless they are retained in 'sandhi' junctions.

The most conspicious features of the morphological system of these languages are: loss of the dual; thematicization of consonantal stems; merger of the f. 'i-/u-' and 'ī-/ū-' in one 'ī-/ū-' inflexion, elimination of the dative, whose functions are taken over by the genitive, simultaneous use of different case-endings in one paradigm; employment of 'mahyaṃ' and 'tubhyaṃ' as genitives and 'me' and 'te' as instrumentals; gradual disappearance of the middle voice; coexistence of historical and new verbal forms based on the present stem; and use of active endings for the passive. In the vocabulary, the MIA languages are mostly dependent on Old Indo-Aryan, with addition of a few so-called 'deśī' words of (often) uncertain origin.

The most archaic of the MIA languages are the inscriptional Aśokan Prakrit on the one hand and Pāli and Ardhamāgadhī on the other, both literary languages.Two other stages of MIA may be distinguished, that of the Prakrits proper (excluding Ardhamāgadhī) and that of the Apabhraṃśa languages.

http://books.google.com/books?id=jPR2Ol ... #PPA163,M1

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Re: Pali and Sanskrit: some history

by Dmytro » Fri Feb 22, 2013 7:34 am

Sekha wrote:

Modern scholars suggest that Pali was probably never spoken by the Buddha himself.In the centuries after the Buddha's death, as Buddhism spread across India into regions that spoke different dialects, Buddhist monks increasingly depended on a common tongue for their discussions of Dhamma and their recitations of memorized texts. It was out of this necessity that the language we now know as Pali emerged.

http://www.peacehall.com/news/gb/englis ... 0400.shtml

viewtopic.php?f=29&t=4630#p73184

I have explored this popular opinion.

Here's what the modern scholars actually suggest.

Oskar von Hinüber writes in detail about the supposed absolutive endings and other hypothetical earlier Pali forms, which would conform to general phonetic pattern of Middle Indo-Aryan:

Pāli as an Artificial Language

http://www.indologica.com/volumes/vol10 ... inuber.pdf

Pāli: How Do We See It Eighty Years After Geiger’s Grammar?

http://books.google.com/books?id=dQTawXTc6vcC&pg=PA459

pp. 459-469

Pāli and Paiśācī as Variants of Buddhist Middle Indic

http://books.google.com/books?id=dQTawXTc6vcC&pg=PA505

pp. 505-521

Daniel Boucher quotes Norman and Bechert:

"K. R. Norman, for example, has argued: "It cannot be emphasized too much that all the versions of canonical Hinayana Buddhist texts which we possess are translations, and even the earliest we possess are translations of some still earlier version, now lost."(123) Heinz Bechert, on the other hand, has suggested that translation - a linguistic transfer between mutually unintelligible languages or dialects - is too strong a characterization of this process:
Some scholars believed that this transformation was a real "translation" of texts which at that time already existed as written literary texts. Others think - and I agree with them - that the transposition was no formalized translation. It was another kind of transformation from one dialect into another dialect, that took place in the course of a tradition, which was still an oral tradition, but had already entered the process of being formalized linguistically . . . .(124)

However, these positions are not necessarily as sharply opposed as they might first appear. Norman has shown that these "translations" were often carried out by scribes who applied certain phonetic rules mechanically.(125)"

http://ccbs.ntu.edu.tw/FULLTEXT/JR-EPT/daniel.htm

So essentially, scholars are talking about a probable "transposition" of certain consonant clusters - mostly the conversion of -(t)tā or -ṭṭha absolutive endings to -tvā and -svā.

In practice, this would mean minor differences in some words, and the supposed earlier form of Pali would be similar to the language of Hathigumpha inscription, as Kenneth Norman writes:

"It has been claimed in the case of Pali that as there are resemblances between it and the Girnar dialect of the Asokan inscriptions, and also between it and the language of the Hathigumpha inscriptions, Pali must have been the language of one or other of these two areas. A careful examination of the language of these inscriptions shows that Pali is not identical with either of them, and there is, moreover, some doubt about the language of the Girnar version of the Asokan inscriptions, since it is possible that it represents, in part at least, the scribe's attempt to convert the Eastern dialect he must have received from Pataliputra into what he thought was appropriate to the region in which the edict was being promulgated, rather than the actual dialect of that region. The language of the Hathigumpha inscription, although it agrees with Pali in the retention of most intervocalic consonants and in the nominative singular in -o, nevertheless differs in that the absolutive ending is -(t)tā, and with two doubtful exceptions there are no consonant groups containing -r-.

While it is not impossible that there existed in India in the third century B. C. an unattested dialect of Middle Indo-Aryan which had all the features of Pali, the fact that some of the consonant clusters found in Pali are unhistoric and must therefore represent incorrect attempts at backformation, e.g. disvā (which cannot be from dṛṣṭva) and atraja (which cannot be from ātmaja), makes it more likely that by the third century B.C. the dialect of the canonical texts of the Theravadins conformed to the general pattern of Middle Indo-Aryan dialects of that time, and all consonant clusters had either been assimilated or resolved. It is probable that this represented the form of the language of the Theravadin canon at the time of the reign of Asoka, which was perhaps the lingua franca of the Buddhists of Eastern India, and not very different from the language of the Hathigumpha inscriptions."

http://ahandfulofleaves.files.wordpress ... n_1983.pdf p. 5

For more details about the Hathigumpha inscription see:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hathigumpha_inscription
http://gujaratisbs.webs.com/Abstracts%2 ... 20More.pdf
http://orissa.gov.in/e-magazine/Journal ... f/9-10.pdf

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