Piya, Jon and others,

I have been a subscriber (eavesdropper) to this group for more than a year and a half, but I
have not often contributed, mostly because I have no expertise in the Buddhist questions
discussed, or in helping people learn Pali. I am certainly not a Pali lecturer of any sort, but
rather a learner. I taught linguistics in California for over 20 years and in Japan for over
13 years. Now I am retired and living in Chiang Mai, Thailand. My interest in Pali is fairly
narrow: primarily in how to best describe the grammar of the language, and secondarily in
the influence of Pali on mainland Southeast Asian languages (Burmese and Thai). As Piya
notes, I did read a paper on Pali morphology at the World conference in 2006 and I wrote
another one for the National Buddhist Studies Conference in Sri Lanka last year, but did
not read it there. These papers investigate similarities and differences between modern
ways to describe Pali and the descriptions found in the Pali grammatical tradition. They
are not intended to help people learn Pali, but if anyone is interested I can send a pdf
version of either or both. Better to ask me offline, I think.

I looked for Buddhadatta's Pali conversation book in Colombo in July when I was there and
did not find it. Many of his other books, including all three volumes of the New Pali
Course, a Pali reader, and his dictionary, are readily available in bookstores there. I think
the conversation book has not been reprinted recently. Perhaps if he can get hold of a
copy, Yong Peng would be interested in going through it as he has done (is doing) with
the New Course, but I don't know whether it contains suitable exercise material. I am
impressed with the enthusiasm of several people who want to learn how to speak Pali in
their daily lives, but I don't think we can expect to see Pali textbooks using the 'aural-oral'
or 'communicative' approachs so popular with modern languages. There is no one who
could write such texts or use them properly to teach the language. That is because Pali is
a dead language without native speakers.

I remain skeptical that Pali is any different from Latin, Sanskrit or Classical Chinese in
matters of (language) life or death. The things Piya lists (coinage of new words, writing
verses (or grammatical treatises, for that matter), changing grammar or terminology, use
as a liturgical language) are all possible for a dead language. We find them all for Latin,
Sanskrit or Classical Chinese. What we don't find are native speakers who know how to
use these languages to say anything they want to say in the manner we do with our native
languages. Or how to teach Pali in the ways we teach French, Hindi or Mandarin. The
historical question Jon raises is an interesting one. He or others may know more about
this than I do, but I see no evidence that Pali was ever a living language anywhere in
mainland SE Asia. It was brought in as a textual canon and learned to a level which no
doubt differed widely from one individual to another by second language learners who
remained native speakers of Burmese, Thai, etc, just as it is today. The case of Sri Lanka is
more difficult, but the usual story that the commentaries were originally written in old
Sinhala and translated into Pali by Buddhaghosa and others (North Indians) suggests that
Pali was never a living language in Sri Lanka either. It must have been a living language in
North India, in spite of textual variations that we see in the canon, from the time of the
Buddha. When it became extinct there is the really interesting question; sometime before
Buddhism itself died out.

with metta,

George B

--- In Pali@yahoogroups.com, "Jon Fernquest" <bayinnaung@...> wrote:
>
> Dear List Members;
>
> Thank you for the information about Buddhadhatta's conversation book.
>
> They probably have that book at Mahachulalongkorn Buddhist University
> in Bangkok, but their catalog is not online so I'll have to check online.
>
> How far back communication in Pali between monks in different
> countries goes back raises an interesting question.
>
> There was a lot of communication between Sri Lanka and the Mon coastal
> region and central Burma and whole libraries transported from Sri
> Lanka to Burma. The Mahavihara lineage made its way to Toungoo around
> 1500. The Siam Nikaya was founded in Sri Lanka in the 18th century. I
> wonder whether they spoke Pali and how the early Pali education was done?
>
> Thanks Again.
>
> Jon
>