Thank you for your responses. Perhaps what I’m saying isn’t clear.
I do claim that Horner’s translation (of chandas in this context) is wrong because the specific meaning that she picks is wrong in that specific context.
The dictionaries are however not wrong but it is their job to suggest all possible meanings, one of which needs to be picked according to context in a given situation. What the context is cannot be inferred from the dictionary (unless the dictionary lists contextual meanings), and not all meanings (suggested in a dictionary) are equally plausible in any given context.
So I dont see how you can take all the meanings the dictionary suggests as being equally/randomly valid. As a translator you pick the meaning based on context - and must not have a preconception that just because the word is used with one meaning elsewhere in the pali canon, all other places in the canon must necessarily have the same meaning for it. When you make such an apriori assumption, your translation suffers (and I mean the “you” in a generic sense, not you personally) - I have heard some Pali translators claim that words have to be translated consistently (with the same meaning wherever they occur) which I found weird as you’re then forcing an artiificial uniformity on the text. Others then rely on those mistranslations to claim that specific Pali words have only that artificially standardized translated meaning - circular logic?
Even in sanskrit, the word ‘chandas’ can and does mean
- poetic metres in general,
- a specific named poetic metre,
- the śāstra involving the study of poetic metres,
- the vedāṅga called chandas dealing with the metres used in the vedic corpus,
- the corpus of vedic poetry, or
- the language of the vedic poetry
The context in each text determines which of the above meanings is more apposite.
In the context of a linguistic contrast between sakā nirutti and chandas - it specifically and primarily refers to the language (and only secondarily, if at all, the poetic form) of the early vedic metrical corpus. This is not to say that other meanings in the dictionary are wrong - however those other meanings don’t apply here in this context.
Yes, I have the DOP with me - and it mentions (1) metre & metrical text, and (2) the form / language of the vedic texts.
So chandas in Pali does also mean the form or language of the vedic texts in a specific context - such as in this ‘sakāya niruttiyā’ context. In fact, Prof. Cone explicitly quotes these phrases "handa mayaṁ, bhante, buddhavacanaṁ chandaso āropema” & “na, bhikkhave, buddhavacanaṁ chandaso āropetabbaṁ” under the 2nd meaning. I don’t see how you can claim that this is not the case?
We dont need Prof. Cone’s dictionary to tell us this - it is quite obvious already.
That is however not its meaning. Vedam means the Veda, not any generic versified scripture. ‘Like the veda’ means a verse composed in vedic sanskrit. Pali verses are by default not likened to ‘vedaṃ’ - so composing verses in Pali (without the vedic accents, and having no lexical / phonetic / grammatical / metrical semblance to the vedic mantras), cannot be described as ‘vedaṃ viya’.
The PED as far as I am aware does not deal with commentarial usages. Sakkaṭabhāsā is obviously saṃskṛta-bhāṣā. Sakkata (from sakkaroti) in the canon can also mean Sanskrit sat-kṛta (Past Passive Participle of sat-karoti) - but that word has nothing to do with any bhāṣā and therefore cannot be compounded with bhāsā. So the meaning for sakkata suggested by PED is contextually inapplicable in the compound sakkaṭabhāsā.
That sounds quite weird when used for a bhāsā. Sakkaroti is normally “showing respect to someone or something, or serving them, honouring them etc”. You dont do satkāra to a bhāṣā.
No, I am saying that the aṭṭhakavagga, pārāyaṇavagga etc (being the historically earliest /foundational suttas of the Pali canon and the Early Buddhist Tradition as a whole) were originally composed in Late-Vedic – and that Late-Vedic is the proto-canonical language of Early Buddhism as a whole - perhaps you havent read my other posts in this thread (click) on the protocanonical language of early-Buddhism fully yet. Pali was not the language of the Buddha, and could not have been - the oldest canonical language of Buddhism was late-Vedic. The Pali Canon (and Gandhari and BHS sources) necessarily derive some of their earliest texts from a late-vedic proto-canonical core-corpus.
What other early-Buddhist texts did this late-vedic proto-canonical core corpus contain (apart from the ones mentioned above by the Divyavadana, the Ud5.6 in the Pāli canon, and the texts mentioned in the Ashokan edicts)? - is a question I dont have a conclusive answer to.
Pali does not have any kind of intonation, tone, accent, pitch etc (they are all translations for the word ‘svara’, referring to the vedic/sanskrit pitch-accent) - and the references to intonation/pitch-accent etc found in the Pali canon are about its existence historically in late-Vedic (from which those texts have been later converted to Pali). The texts of the Pali canon that derive from proto-canonical late-Vedic originals may have been originally accented when they were still in late-vedic sanskrit (or could be alternatively recited with accents because accented recitation for non-accented sanskrit texts was possible in late-vedic sanskrit during the time of the Buddha). However this doesnt necessarily mean every single text surviving in the Pali canon today derives from an accented / unaccented late-vedic original.