Sure. As far as I can see, the Pāḷi tradition understood quite well what the senses are, with an internally consistent picture in the canon itself of what the terms under discussion mean or can mean. I would wager the above demonstrated that.
Can you direct me to any publication arguing that Pāḷi is derived from Classical Sanskrit? I mean I am no expert by any means on the subject, but I just heard about Vedic being a candidate but never CS. That is how I summarized some of the opinions elseswhere earlier (see under the link for exact references):
Basing himself upon morphological and lexical features, Oberlies states that Pāḷi cannot be a direct continuation of Vedic, but Geiger and Pischel stress its closer relation to Vedic rather than Classical Sanskrit, the latter from which Pāḷi, they maintain, cannot directly be derived. Wackernagel (as quoted by Karpik) and others (Karpik, Oberlies) argue for a parallel development of Vedic and the Prakrits in general, among which Pāḷi and the other Middle Indo-Aryan dialects are sometimes classified (Geiger, Norman). Pischel maintains that “[…] it does not seem probable that all the Prakrit dialects sprang out from one and the same source.” Woolner and von Hinüber, on the other hand, see them as (essentially) derived from Vedic. For Levman “the actual answer appears to lie in the middle.”
Thanks for the link. Yes, I think the fact that the Theravādins did actually stick to the Buddha’s advice in this case speaks for the fact that they took pain to conserve Buddha-vacana, a feature often especially attributed to this school, actually. I now saw that I also engaged in discussing the topic of sakāya niruttiya and chandaso earlier here; if I may share as well.
The Pāḷi tradition is clear about it, which I would simply refer to as additional evidence, as the Samantapāsādikā has it, indicating that it was not Sasnkrit per se but the way of recitation (as you actually pointed out): “let us commit [or ‘entrust’] to the chando: let us commit to the way of recitation like the Veda is done in the honored speech. […] ‘own tongue’ means the common speech belonging to Magadha (māgadhiko vohāro) in the manner spoken (vuttappakāro) by the Perfectly Enlightened One.” I also once asked Patrick Olivelle about what he thinks chandaso refers to in the passage under discussion. His reply was this:
With regard to “chandas”, which is your main question, the term has several related meanings. First, it is one of the Vedāṅgas, the limbs of the Veda, and in that context it refers to meter. It also had a related meaning of chant (probably metrical texts were chanted), and was connected especially with the Brahmins of the Sāma Veda. So we have the “chāndogya upaniṣad” belonging to the Chāndoga brahmins.
In grammatical literature chandas is used with reference to the language of the Veda (as Pollock has pointed out), especially in contradistinction to “bhāṣā” which was the spoken Sanskrit of the time. The distinction in grammar between the two is often pointed out. This distinction parallels the other distinction you find in grammatical works between “Veda” and “loka” — that is what is found in the Veda, including its language, and what is found in the world, the normal discourse and speech patterns.
So, the Buddhist reference [i.e. that of *sakāya niruttiyā*] clearly parallels the latter meaning, and must refer to the way Vedic texts are composed, especially the metrical part, and the language in which it is composed — which is supposed to be eternal and fixed. This also facilitated the memorization of the texts — after all there were no written texts then; the Veda was all in memory.
Rhys Davids & Oldenberg, Geiger, Winternitz, Brough, and Gombrich also agree that chandaso refers to Sanskrit. As was pointed out by Pollock, chandas was used by Pāṇini (fl. ca. 5th century BCE) for “the idiom actually used for the Vedic texts themselves.” Whatever the case may be, the incidence at least shows that the Buddha was not in favor of some feature that relates to Sanskrit.
Hmm; you may be right. Did you yourself write on the topic in some publication (academic paper, book etc.)? I would be interested to know about it.