--- In Pali@yahoogroups.com, Edward Miller <emillersa1@...> wrote:

> If Pali wasn't a lingua franca of northern India, then what
> language did the Buddha speak?

Dear Edward,

It is sometimes said that the Buddha spoke the Magadhi language. The
trouble is, we have no records of the Magadhi language, so simply
saying "the Buddha spoke Magadhi" may or may not answer your
question!

Two hundred years after the time of the Buddha, yhe emperor Ashoka
(3rd century B.C.) had pillars with edicts on them put up over large
parts of India, and by studying the edicts on these pillars we can
get some idea of the way language varied from place to place. Hence
we can speculate a little about what Magadhi may have looked like.
For example the vocative plural form bhikkhave is thought to be
typically Magadhi. But that's about as far as we can go.

Derek.