Mainland S.E.A. Pali "By-" vs. "Vy-" & "b" vs. "p"

  I've been systematically "sifting" through all of the salient
linguistic articles (in English) at the E.F.E.O. library, and have so
far found a few articles with a bearing on the "b" vs. "v" question
that we entertained earlier on the list.

As I earlier suspected (but could find no evidence to support, and so
dropped) there is an orthographic problem at the bottom of this --and
it may well be predicated upon an earlier (South-Indian) phonological
problem.

I'll later write this up as part of an article in progress about the
mutability of Pali in mainland S.E.A., but, to comment informally:

   "In ancient Khmer, the graph _b_ was rarely used (Jacob, 1960)
because, in general, the graph _v_ was used to transcribe the phoneme
/b/ as well as /v/. (Ferlus, 1993) ... When the Pallava script was
adapted to ancient Khmer the graph _v_ was taken to transcribe the two
phonemes /v/ and /b/ which led to ambiguity, as the graph /b/ was
rarely used."
   [Michel Ferlus, 1997 "The Origin of the Graph <b> in the Thai
Script", in _South East Asian Linguistic Studies in Honour of Vichin
Panupong_, Arthus S. Abramson, ed., Chulalongkorn University Press]

   When looking at early Khmer/Khom attempts to write Sanskrit, and the
transition of these words into Fa-Kham script (i.e., arguably as
"loan-words" in Thai languages) it is obvious that there was
considerable confusion about "b" vs. "v", with the Khmer "solution"
emerging from the 11th-13th centuries in the importing of a "new" _b_
glyph of (possibly) Monic inspiration (i.e., marking the end of the
old square/blob "b" form that was almost unchanged when adapted to
Khmer-Pallava from Ashokan (and/or similar South-Indian) sources).
   This "solution" for Khmer script probably led to further confusion
in Fa-Kham script(s), which seemed to independently develop their own
new "b" form by horizontally doubling the old "p" --and this new form
is the basis for modern Thai's four (tonally differentiated) "p" & "f"
glyphs.

   Ferlus [op. cit. supra] generally proposes that the ultimate origin
of all this confusion was the South-Indian pronunciation of "b" and
"v" as almost mutually-indistinguishable; one could augment this by
drawing attention to the fact that Thai and related languages had to
(at the same time) modify Khmer/Pallava script to allow for vernacular
differences between "p" sounds that did not exist in the classical
langauge, while at the same time having trouble over the aspirated
labials. Ferlus also shows (but does not emphasise) that for a period
of a few centuries the "p" and "v" glyphs in Fa-Kham looked mutually
very similar; at the same time, we may say that the vernacular use of
"p" & "v/w/semivowel" sounds was developing its own orthographic
expressions that were more and more strange from the classical
Sk./Pali.

   To make a long story short, I'm finding that there was much more
confusion (from a much earlier date) in the "importing" of Sk. & Pali
"b"-vs.-"v"-vs.-"p" distinctions than I had at first suspected.  This
can be explained/substantiated orthographically, although the root of
the problem is doubtless phonetic. I did not realize the (ancient)
orthographic difficulty involved in my earlier inquiries into this
because I was not considering developmental questions of Fa-Kham
script, and also generally did not consider the Sk.-Khmer epigraphic
evidence (as the latter is not my special interest, and I don't have
materials about it in my own bookshelf, etc.).

   I would still say that I can find no similar difficulty in the Mon
family of scripts, except that these have some separate sources of
confusion because of the use of "v" as a semivowel, etc.; but it would
be difficult to measure the extent to which "b"-"v"
substitutions/variations existed in each of the sources of
transmission of Pali texts prior to their arrival in mainland S.E.A.

   To what extent can spellings such as "Byakarana" and "Byapara" (as
opposed to Vyakarana & Vyapara) be attributed to Cambodian
transmission or (an issue raised before) to what extent can they be
explained by divisions that existed within Pali, such as the tendency
to foist "Sanskritized" back-formations upon certain Prakritic
spellings, etc.?

E.M.