Hello and thanks for getting in touch directly with this group concerning your article "The Buddha Spoke Pali". I have already found and read the 'short' version available on-line and found it thought-provoking. I am not a linguist, rather a Pali scholar with a knowledge of Sanskrit, but I foresee several objections to your line of thinking:
1. You doubt that the oral tradition which preserved the Buddha's teaching would have translated that teaching from one language or dialect into another language or dialect, which we now know as Pali. Hence you infer that Pali was in fact the language originally spoken by the Buddha. However, it is well known that the Pali canon is simply the one surviving complete version of the early Buddhist scriptures, that happens to be in the Pali language, probably because missionaries who travelled to Sri Lanka knew this version of the Buddhist scriptures. There is evidence from the Chinese translations, for instance, that suggest that the early Buddhist teachings were also preserved in other Prakrits, no longer extant. So your argument assumes a privileged position for Pali among the vernaculars in which the Buddha's teaching were memorised, which I do not think is warranted.
2. My understanding from the scholarly work of Norman, Von Hinuber, etc., is that the 'translation' involved between versions of the Buddha's teaching would have been between various Middle-Indo-Aryan dialects, which may have been mutually intelligible to some well-travelled people like Buddhist monks. This possibly gets round the problem you raise, that of the unlikelihood of an oral tradition translating between languages.
3. The idea that Pali corresponds to any single original language or dialect is problematic. The Pali of the early records of the Buddha's teaching has gone through a 'Sanskritization' process which blocks our knowledge of many original forms, though some, like 'baahma.na' for 'braahma.na', can be reconstructed. Because we do not have very much evidence for actual languages that existed at the time of the Buddha except for the language preserved as Pali, which has been Sanskritized and modified, it is going to be difficult to pin down the relationship of Pali to the language actually spoken by the Buddha, except as conjecture.
4. Your idea that the Buddha spoke Pali sounds like Theravadin orthodoxy but given a new twist.
But in conclusion it seems to me very reasonable to say, from a certain point of view, that it is likely that Pali is more or less similar to whatever language or dialects the Buddha spoke, and it is a marvellous thing that we have access to a language that may preserve echoes of the Buddha's very words.
Best wishes
Dhivan
www.dhivan.net
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