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,

1. Old English (Anglo-Saxon) pre 1100, unintelligible to us
2. Middle English 1100-1500, fairly intelligible in writing, but the pronunciation would be unintelligible to the uninformed
3. Early Modern English 1500-1700, largely intelligible but noticeably different
4. 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)