Re: Slightly OT: Podcast Tagline in Pali

Dear Bryan,

Comments below.
> Dear Lance,
>
> Thanks for your response.
>
>> What we actually know is that a single 'epigraphic' language is used in
>> virtually all post-Asokan inscriptions in the last centuries A.D.
> You mean the last centuries B.C. I assume? By the "epigraphic" language are you referring to the Hatthigumpha inscription? That is the oldest we have post-Aśoka I think. Do you have a reference for it, besides Salomon's book (who doesn't describe it in much detail)?

Yes, I certainly did mean the last centuries B.C.

I didn't mean specifically the Hāthīgumphā inscription but that is
certainly included. (It may be the oldest long inscription post-Asoka
but there a many short ones.) Saloman presents this very nicely on
p.76f. Referring to 'this standard epigraphic Prakrit' he comments that
"in the south it is abundantly attested in inscriptions from such sites
as Nāgārjunakoṇḍa and Amarāvatī." One can also point to inscriptions
from Bhārhut and Sāñcī.
> But what about the Aśoka inscriptions themselves? A comparison between
> them and Pāli (in terms of lexemic content) shows convincingly (to me
> anyways) that the latter has a wide variety of dialects in it.
But that is just what we don't find. The NW is a special case where a
different script is used and even Aramaic or Greek occasionally. This
must be to do with the historic circumstances of succession from Persian
rule. We should view this as essentially a different country under
Mauryan rule with its own administrative practices.

Attempts to find more than two dialects elsewhere have generally been
rejected. So we have only the anomaly of Girnār (and a fragment from
Sopāra which uses the akṣara 'r' to write both historic 'l' and 'r' to
represent a 'western dialect'. Everything else is in some kind of
'eastern' dialect. What Asoka certainly doesn't have is a policy of
writing in the local dialect — there is nothing in any Dravidian language.

Note that in the Pillar Edicts Asoka indicates unhappiness or at least
awareness that his earlier inscriptions had been edited or inscribed
incorrectly. Certainly the Pillar Edicts are written in a much more
standardized language.

Some of the features of Girnār (if authentic and I have doubts about
that) can partly be accounted for as due to early Sanskritization, as
K.R.Norman has argued. Or, one could think of a more broadly educated
scribe.

I think that many of the features we think of as dialectical were in
practice simply optional (whatever their ultimate origin). There was no
feeling that there should be a standard way of expressing things. So,
for example, assimilation and the insertion of an epenthetic vowel are
options everywhere. It is just that one or the other option might be
more frequent in the writing of a particular individual or area.
> Have you seen my article on "Is Pāli closest to the western Aśokan
> dialect of Girnār?"
No, I don't think I have. I have a list of your articles from a website
and have seen one or two of them in libraries, but I don't have copies
of any of them. I have been teaching Jaina Prakrit rather than Aśokan
here over the last couple of years. So I am not quite up-to-date with
Aśokan.
> In there I compare one Asokan rock edict (RE 4) to the Pāli  word for
> word and find that 19% of the word-forms are similar to Girnār (west),
> 43% to Kālsī, Shābāzgaṛhī and Mānsehrā (taken collectively as
> representing the north and north west, 20% to Dhauli (east) and 18% to
> Eṛṛaguḍi (south). Pāli was certainly standardized over time as it was
> written down (like the change of the absolutive ending from -ttā to
> -tvā which von Hinüber writes about), but one can still find many
> dialect forms in it, using the Aśokan edicts as a benchmark, Mettā, Bryan

I am not convinced you can group Kālsī with the NW. It is in any case
rather full of errors.

Lance Cousins