Talk:Pali
Needed
Need to verify and provide a reference for the dates of written Pali. As it stands, this is all gathered from chat rooms and unofficial websites.Pat Palmer (talk) 13:48, 26 July 2020 (UTC)
- I've deleted the statement for now as it's problematic. There are no manuscripts that early that would normally be called Pali, but it depends on definitions. I'll get back when I've got time (Friday?)> Peter Jackson (talk) 09:48, 29 July 2020 (UTC)
Consider English. We have, conventionally,
- Old English (Anglo-Saxon) pre 1100, unintelligible to us
- Middle English 1100-1500, fairly intelligible in writing, but the pronunciation would be unintelligible to the uninformed
- Early Modern English 1500-1700, largely intelligible but noticeably different
- Moder English post 1700
So what's "English"?
Pali's slightly different in that we have no early manuscripts. The manuscripts and printed editions of the Canon are in a language not much different from that of later literature, but I think most scholars believe that the canonical texts have been linguistically altered over the centuries. They don't entirely agree on what changes were made and when. It's not even clear whether the canonical texts were originally composed in a single language/dialect, or whether they were varied and later standardized, and if so when. Peter Jackson (talk) 11:56, 31 July 2020 (UTC)
The explanation of sangha sounded very modern. Peter Jackson (talk) 10:47, 5 August 2020 (UTC)
Grammar question
In the next to last sentence of the History section, is the pronoun antecedent for "He considers" meant to be Cousins or Norman?Pat Palmer (talk) 04:40, 7 December 2020 (UTC)
- Grammatically, the sense of a sentence should run on with all bracketed material removed, but you're probably right it should be clarified. Peter Jackson (talk) 10:26, 7 December 2020 (UTC)
Yay for the alphabet
Peter, thanks for including the alphabet. I'm trying to get a little program I wrote to display all these correctly in a text file, so now I know exactly what to test for.Pat Palmer (talk) 14:34, 14 December 2020 (UTC)
- The WP article on Pali has a lot of stuff about the IT realizations of Pali (maybe too much in proportion to the amount on the language itself). I've got more to write, but not IT, which I leave to specialists like you. Peter Jackson (talk) 10:37, 16 December 2020 (UTC)