Pali
This article is about the Pali language; for other meanings, see Pali (disambiguation).
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Pali (पाळि Pāḷi, German 'der Text' "the line") is a Middle Indo-Aryan language. Whether Pali was ever a spoken language is considered controversial. Today it is classified more as a literary language. Pali belongs to the Prakrit languages.
Pali and Buddhism
Pali is closely related to Buddhism. During the first phase of Buddhism (about 500 BC to 1st century BC), the corpus of early Buddhist scriptures was formed. During this time, the "texts" were transmitted orally collectively. The Buddha is believed to have taught at Ardhamagadhi; however, nothing of the Buddha's historical words survives. Of what consisted of these first anthologizations of his expositions, only translations into other languages - primarily Pali and, somewhat later, a hybrid form of Sanskrit - exist. The most complete corpus of early Buddhist lore is available in the Pali Suttas, the Vinaya, and the oldest parts of the Abhidhamma. (These are referred to as the Pali Canon by the considerably later Theravāda school.) The Pali text collection was recorded in Sinhala characters in Ceylon in the early 1st century BCE. A number of Pali textual citations are found on Ashoka's edicts and constitute the earliest written textual witnesses of Pali to date.
Pali is still a sacred language in Southeast Asia today and is similar in meaning to the Church Latin of Western Europe or the Church Slavonic of Russia. Even today, educated monks compose religious texts in Pali to make them accessible to the international monastic community (especially in Myanmar, Thailand and Sri Lanka).
Sanskrit and Pali
Sanskrit and Pali have many similarities in vocabulary. Also noteworthy is the similar basic structure in grammar (three genders, function of the casus, tenses, modes, etc.).
In Pali (as in Sanskrit) all eight cases of the original Indo-European language have been preserved: Nominative, Vocative, Accusative, Instrumentalis, Dative, Ablative, Genitive and Locative. The dual of Sanskrit does not exist in Pali.
Sanskrit and Pali are phonetically similar. However, the two sh sounds of Sanskrit (ś, ṣ) do not occur in Pali, nor do vocalic r and l or the diphthongs ai and au. In addition, Pali uses short e and o as counterparts to the long ē and ō of Sanskrit. In place of consonant compounds in Sanskrit, Pali uses single or double consonants (for example, Sanskrit nirvana, Pali nibbana).
Despite its similarities to Rigvedic Sanskrit, it has morphonological and lexical differences that suggest that it derives from one or more dialects that were distinct from Rigvedic Sanskrit.
