Why not raise one of your kids speaking Pali :-) Suddenly the dead language
is alive again. Anyone tried this with Latin :-)
As all things are impermanent maybe the death of Pali too...(*joking*)
However, i recall a couple of instances myself, where Pali had helped me
communicating with (young) monks in Sri Lanka who did not speak any English.
It did work. My problem however was, that through the study of the Suttas
you tend to use words and sentence composition which is quite different from
the approach monks in Sri Lanka tend to study Pali, namely, with a huge
focus on the commentaries.
On the other hand, that helped them having words for almost all (monastic)
activities and even short phrases, which derive from those little stories
narrated in the commentaries....Most of the time i understood what they
said, once i got the vocabulary. However, they found my answers strange,
because i would tend to use words found frequently in the Sutta-Pitaka
with metta,
Lennart
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