Ashoka used the Brahmi script in his inscriptions, which was usual in
India at the time. Brahmi was probably originally invented to write
Sanskrit and dialects older than Pali, but was no doubt used to write
Pali in the Buddha's time (originally a Magadhi-dialect, I think).
New finds from south India have pushed the dating of Brahmi back from
Ashoka's time to the Buddha's, giving us every reason to believe that
this was the Buddha's alphabet. There are some variations in the
characters, which were variously used for rock-inscriptions, palm-
leaf-writing, etc.. Macintosh has a Brahmi-font available, based on
the forms in Ashoka's inscriptions. The alphabets of India, Burma,
Tailand, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Tibet, etc. (most south-east Asian
alphabets) all derive from Brahmi, which makes it the ideal alphabet
for writing Pali, in my opinion, not to mention that Buddha himself
would almost certainly have understood it. Anyway, that's my brief
input on the script-issue. There are Wikipedia articles and various
other items online about Brahmi, some showing the alphabet. I have
seem the Macintosh Brahmi font, and it looks very nice :)

A.K.Oddsson

--- In Pali@yahoogroups.com, Gunnar Gällmo <gunnargallmo@...> wrote:
>
> --- Eukesh Ranjit <eukeshranjit@...> skrev:
>
> > Wandanaa all,
> > I found the link to this group in Pali wikipedia
> > (online free to edit
> > and free to use encyclopedia in Pali language).
> > Currently, I am the
> > administrator there. However, the wikipedia is not
> > doing well due to
> > lack of articles in the language. The lack of
> > articles might have been
> > due to lack of knowledge of Devnagari amongst users.
>
> Why Devanagari? As far as I know, Devanagari has been
> used for Pali only for a very short time, and only
> locally in India. Devanagari became standard script
> for Sanskrit in the 18th century, not earlier, and
> Pali still doesn't have a standard script. Sinhalese,
> Burmese and Thai scripts (perhaps Khmer script as
> well) are probably more used than Devanagari for Pali,
> but the only Pali script that is used more than
> locally may be Roman.
>
> I think the main problem for the Pali Wikipedia is the
> fact that very few people have an active writing
> capacity in Pali. For most of us it is an "input
> language", a language which we try to read and
> understand out of interest in the Pali texts, but not
> a language in which we are able to express ourselves
> freely.
>
> Gunnar
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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