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 (8)
Featured:
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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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Readings (20)
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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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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.
18 pages -
⭐ Recommended
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.
11 pages -
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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⭐ Recommended
25 min -
Nearly a thousand Pāli words recorded by a professor of South Asian phonetics.
17 min -
A few dozen Pāḷi terms clearly pronounced to give an idea of its sound.
2 min
Reference Shelf (11)
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A table comparing how Bhante Sujato and Bhikkhu Bodhi translate a variety of Pāli terms.
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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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An extremely concise reference sheet for reading early Pāli.
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Subtopics (3)
- Pāli Dictionaries
- The Pāli Language: Level 1 (Course)
- The Pāli Language: Level 2 (Course)