Dear Frank,



Perhaps I could help a little bit.



Pali does indeed predate classical Sanskrit, but is probably roughly
contemporaneous, or at least for a time ran a parallel course, with Vedic,
which is an earlier and far less regularised form of what later became
Sanskrit. Both Pali and Vedic almost certainly come from an earlier - now
lost - common stock. The extreme value of making comparisons between Pali
and Sanskrit is that Sanskit has preserved many of the forms that have been
lost in Pali. The most important for the purposes of the present discussion
is compound consonants.



In Sanskrit: dharati = hold, from which is derived dharma.

In Pali: dharati = hold, identical to Sanskrit. But with the addition of
-ma, the compound consonant /rm/ becomes /mm/, whence dhamma.



Where there is a compound consonant at the beginning of a word, Pali almost
always reduces it to a single consonant:

Sanskrit: smriti

Pali: sati.



Although Pali reduces the initial compound consonant to a single consonant,
the language retained the 'shadow' of the missing element. So, although the
speakers could not start a word with a double consonant, the doubling crept
back in when it could, i.e. when it was supported by a vowel at the end of
the preceding word in the compound. Thus: sati becomes anapana-ssati.



Another example is:

Sanskrit: pravartana (turning, as in turning the wheel of the law).

Pali: pavattana. Here, the /pr/ reduces (as an initial) to /p/, and the
intervocalic /rt/ reduces to /tt/.



Now, when pavattana follows a preceding vowel in a compound, the doubled
/pp/ takes the opportunity to come back: whence
dhamma-cakka-ppavattana-sutta.



So, the phenomenon of a double consonant at the beginning of word when it is
the second or later element in a compound is simply the reappearance of
another consonant that was there in an earlier form of the language. By the
way if you look in the vocabularies in Warder's Introduction to Pali, you
will see many words beginning with an initial letter in brackets, e.g.
(p)pa-yaa. This simply means that on its own the own it begins with a
single /p/, but it will double when it 'gets the chance'.



If we trace Pali back to an earlier form, now lost but reconstructible with
a reasonable degree of certainty for the present purposes, we will almost
certainly find the unreduced forms of the compound consonants.



Although it is not strictly historically accurate to say that Pali actually
derives from Sanskrit, nevertheless it is very often perfectly accurate to
say that Sanskrit preserves many forms that Pali has lost, and the Pali
derives from those exact same forms that still exist in Sanskrit. So, from
that point of view, when we say for example that dhamma 'comes from' or is
derived from the Sanskrit dharma, this is just a convenient shorthand way of
saying that dhamma comes from an older form of the word that has been
preserved unaltered in Sanskrit as dharma.



It is a moot point whether the Buddha actually spoke the same language that
is preserved in the Pali Canon. This is a big subject, for which I can do
no better at present than to refer you to Stefan Karpik's excellent article
on the subject. He concludes, with very cogent reasons, that it was the
same. Anyway, even if it wasn't exactly the same as the spoken language of
Magadha at the time, then it must have been near enough to have made no real
difference. However, the point is that at that time the language was not
written, and when in due course it did come to be written is was written in
scripts originally devised for other languages. These scripts had their
own conventions. In one of them, the Devanagari script, used for Sanskrit,
the convention was to run compounded words together into one long string.
Scripts deriving from Devanagari (or from a common stock) tended to do the
same. The string could be made even longer when separate words were written
together under the rules of sandhi, i.e. when the last sound of the
preceding word merged with the first sound of the following one. A simple
example is the opening words of the Story of Nala: aasiit raajaa 'there was
a king'. By sandhi, the final /t/ of aasiit becomes /d/. So it is aasiid
raajaa. Now, by a convention of the Devanagari script, the syllables are
divided thus: aa-sii-draa-jaa. We thus get the written syllable /draa/
which is the last consonant of the preceding word, with the first syllable
of the following one. ( /dr/ is written as a compound ligature in
Devanagari.) For that reason, with a combination of compounding and sandhi,
sometimes entire sentences are written without a break between the words.
Awfully difficult for beginners.



The bottom line is that we write dhammavicayabojjhanga because it was
written all as one word a long time ago under the conventions of one or more
scripts that were never designed for Pali in the first place. There is no
reason we have to maintain those conventions, and I entirely support those
who would hyphenate for clarity. Since Pali, like Vedic, is primarily an
oral tradition (by total contrast to e.g. Chinese, which is primarily a
written tradition), there is nothing 'unPali' or fake about writing it in
any way we choose. (By the way, contemporary websites in Sanskrit written
in Devanagari mostly ignore sandhi and write the words separately. That
tends to show that even traditionally minded Hindus blogging in Sanskrit
regard themselves as being free to accommodate the script to modern tastes
and requirements, rather than vice versa.)



Regrettably, however, whether we hyphenate or not, or just leave gaps
between the words, we cannot avoid having to accommodate, for the sake of
linguistic accuracy, the reappearance of the doubled consonant at the
beginning of a word in compound, or the merging or vowels. If we ignore
these phenomena, we lose something of the carefully preserved oral
tradition. Alas, the Ven. Pandita is absolutely right when he says: 'If
you choose to write "anapana-sati" instead, it won't be real Pali'.



Having seen your post on the subject, I might have to ask you for help in
getting the DPR to work. I find Sanskrit more manageable than computers!



With metta,

James Whelan







From: Pali@yahoogroups.com [mailto:Pali@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of frank
Sent: 25 January 2010 20:22
To: Pali@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: compounding - Re: [Pali] dhammavicaya





Hello Ven. Pandita,
Thank you for the explanation, however it confuses me more than it
clarifies. I thought pali predated sanskrit, and that the written pali
language was predated by a spoken Maggada(?). So in the Buddha's time,
there was no "real pali". AnapanaSSati did not exist as a written word.
Only phonetic sounds and syllables sounding something like,
"uh-nuh-punnuh-sa-tee" existed in the language, transmitted by speaking
from monk to monk, village to village. I'm not trying to say there are
no legitimate grammatical reasons for what you explained, I'm just
trying to understand why compounding has to be represented in writing
the way it is today.
If I were to represent sounds of compound dhamma words in written
form like this:
anapana-sati,
dhamma-vicaya-sambojjanga,
samadhi-indriya,
sadda-indriya,
panna-indriya,
etc., is there any ambiguity or grammatical reason where the receiver of
my written communication could misinterpret what I wrote?
Whereas I see "pannindriya" in the romanized pali text it looks like a
complete and new stranger to me even though I'm completely familiar with
panna and indriya.
I don't really see hyphens as an eye sore either, if that's the only
objection of why compounding is not represented with hyphens. I was just
reading a dual pali/english line by line sutta where the author
translated ekayano as "one-way-path". Is that "real" english? I don't
know the answer to that, but I do know as a native English speaker that
the hyphens did not introduce any ambiguity or alter the intended
meaning from the sender. In fact, it improved the clarity.
Ultimately the Buddha was most interested in teaching about dukkha
and its cessation, using whatever the most popular language and simple
words that could communicate meaning the most clearly to as many people
of as many cultures and backgrounds, for as long as possible. If he
thought that hyphens in written transmissions of suttas would reduce
the steep pali learning curve for buddhists from the future, I bet he
would approve.

-Frank

On 1/25/2010 9:48 AM, ashinpan wrote:
>
>
> Frank,
>
> You wrote:
>
> > Since the pali suttas were an oral tradition originally, not written,
> > and the fact that it exists now in thai script, roman script, and
> > whatever other localized script, I wonder if there is some reason
> why we
> > can not adopt a convention of compounding that allows the exploitation
> > and ease in digital processing/searching. For example, if compound
> words
> > were written as anapana-sati instead of anapanaSSati,
> > dhamma-vicaya-sambojjhanga, etc, wouldn't that lend clarity, structure,
> > ease in understanding and communicating as well as instant dictionary
> > lookup capability? Am I missing something? Is there a good reason for
> > "anapanaSSati" instead of "anapana-sati"?
>
> In the example that you give, i.e., "anapanaSSati", the cons. "s" is
> doubled because "sati" is derived from the Skt. form "sm.rti" and the
> conjunct "sm" of the original "sm.rti" is assimilated into "ss" when
> "sati" is a non-initial compound member.
>
> If you choose to write "anapana-sati" instead, it won't be real Pali.
> Rather it will only be your interpretation of that particular compound.
>
> with metta
>
> Ven. Pandita
>

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