Earliest Pali Orthography & its implications

> I think that there is sufficient evidence to show that the writing system
> used by those Buddhists who wrote down the canon included the reproduction
> of geminate consonants. In fact, geminate consonants are responsible for
> lowering a preceding vowel ...

It is very strange that you assert the latter is a proof of the
former.  Not all writing systems are phonetically accurate or even
lexically adequate; on the contrary, almost all of the world's writing
systems are full of imperfections that both confound many different
sounds, and many different meanings, with only a limited set of
symbols.  The evidence that Pali passed through a period of
phonetically imperfect orthography (similar to what we find on over
1,300 cave walls in Sri Lanka) *does not* entail that the actual
pronounciation or understanding of the words omitted (e.g.) the
distinction between ttha, ttta, ta, taa, ttaa, etc.

The fact that many of such geminate clusters were all represented by
only a few symbols (without sufficient accuracy/variation) would be no
more confusing to a reader/speaker than the huge range of phonetic
values that English consonants are expected to represent (without
sufficient accuracy/variation).

Most European languages that have had the Roman script foisted upon
them have a massive gap between orthography and phonetic reality
(thus, many words that would seem to rhyme in writing do not do so in
speech, and vice-versa; an easy-to-understand proof of the matter, for
those who do not have degrees in linguistics); there is no reason to
suppose that this sort of orthographic limitation presented any great
challenge to the transmission of the Pali canon.

I find the evidence that Pali had a period of "imperfect" orthography
prior to the current system compelling; but, in any case, the points
you raise (although interesting) say nothing against it.

> Kaccaayana has Vaasi.ttha, evidently a
> Sanskritism that never influenced the transmission of the canon.

I will indeed make a note of that.

> ... bhaddante,
> which appears to have been better preserved in the burmese tradition. I do
> not think that the Burmese invented this spelling, which only occurs in
> verse and initially in prose.

This further example of reduplication of a consonant is being
preserved in one textual tradition, and lost/eliminated in another,
would seem to weigh in favour of my own view of both this and the
other issue under current discussion.

E.M.