Pali
Channel: 宇宙のすべての知識 プリンシピア
Date: 2019-03-08

Pali, by Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=38337 / CC BY SA 3.0

#Pali
#Indo-Aryan_languages
#Pali_words_and_phrases
Pali

Pali (; ') or Magadhan"' is a Middle Indo-Aryan language native to the Indian subcontinent. It is widely studied because it is the language of the "Pāli Canon" or "Tipiṭaka", and is the sacred language of some religious texts of Hinduism and all texts of "Theravāda" Buddhism. The earliest archaeological evidence of the existence of canonical Pali comes from Pyu city-states inscriptions found in Burma dated to the mid 5th to mid 6th century CE.

The word Pali is used as a name for the language of the Theravada canon. According to the Pali Text Society's Dictionary, the word seems to have its origins in commentarial traditions, wherein the "Pāli" (in the sense of the line of original text quoted) was distinguished from the commentary or vernacular translation that followed it in the manuscript. As such, the name of the language has caused some debate among scholars of all ages; the spelling of the name also varies, being found with both long "ā" and short "a" , and also with either a retroflex or non-retroflex "l" sound. Both the long ā and retroflex ḷ are seen in the ISO 15919/ALA-LC rendering, Pāḷi; however, to this day there is no single, standard spelling of the term, and all four possible spellings can be found in textbooks. R. C. Childers translates the word as "series" and states that the language "bears the epithet in consequence of the perfection of its grammatical structure".

In the 19th century, the British Orientalist Robert Caesar Childers argued that the true or geographical name of the Pali language was Magadhi Prakrit, and that because "pāḷi" means "line, row, series", the early Buddhists extended the meaning of the term to mean "a series of books", so "pāḷibhāsā" means "language of the texts". However, modern scholarship has regarded Pali as a mix of several Prakrit languages from around the 3rd century BCE, combined ...