--- johnny pruitt <mahasacham@...> skrev:

> I have always heard that it was a pigeon language
> put together by Buddhist scholars.

You mean pidgin language, don't you? Pigeons don't
speak pidgin.

Anyhow, I think the term is not correct here. I think
pidgin languages are generally not made by scholars,
but appear more or less spontaneously when needed, and
primarily not for the sake of philosophical
discussions but for more practical purposes.

An example is South Chinese English Pidgin, mainly
used for commercial purpuses, which I think consisted
of English words put together according to Chinese
syntax, as the South Chinese dialects were too
different to be mutually understandable.

Another example is "Russenorsk", used during contacts
between Norwegian and Russian fishermen; the
Norwegians thought they were speaking Russian, the
Russians thought they were speaking Norwegian, but
actually it was about half of each.

When a pidgin language becomes established, such as
Tok Pisin ("Talk Pidgin") in New Guinea, it is not
called a pidgin language any more, but a creole
language.

If Pali was actually put together by scholars, it
would be better to call it a planned language than a
pidgin language. Actually, any written language with
some kind of grammatical norms is more or less
planned.

In Europe, there have been some ideas to create a
perfectly logical language for philosophical purpuses,
a so called "a-priorical planned language", where all
categories of human thought are put in a kind of
logical grid. These plans have failed, for two
reasons: human thought is not very logical, and no one
ever managed to memorise those vocabularies.

There has been better success for som "a-posteriorical
planned languages", such as Esperanto, where grammar
is made as logical as humanly possible (which is not
100%), while the vocabulary is taken from the dominant
languages, especially words that are common to them -
meaning quite a lot of Latin.

According to some theories, Pali was constructed in a
way somewhat similar to Esperanto, which may be an
exaggeration. For one thing, Esperanto was initiated
to serve all purposes of a human language, while Pali
is used "only" for the Dhamma - there is no secular
use of Pali to speak of.

And for another, the base for Pali seems to have been
only one or a few contemporary variants of Prakrit.
Forms from Sanskrit, which was much more standardized
than Prakrit, were avoided.

Gunnar







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