Hello Konrad,

Would you have any precisions, and possibly
references, to these discoveries in Southern India
that would push back Brahmi syllabary up to he time of
the Buddha ?

Thanks,

Jacques Huynen
--- akoddsson <konrad_oddsson@...> wrote:

> 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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