Hello friends, does anyone know some solid Pali etymological materials? Most of the online stuff doesn’t fit the bill and i really like deep diving some of these words.
Why don’t you share what you know about but doesn’t fit the bill? That way we won’t post things you aren’t happy with.
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By “solid” do you mean from the perspective of modern historical philology or from that of traditional Theravada scholasticism?
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I just want to find something scholarly.I don’t know who is good and who isn’t (I’ve come across some very odd takes on other sites that don’t make sense to me)
The dictionary here is great but I like digging into roots and development of words.
The Dictionary of Pali is quite good with highlighting Sanskrit forms from which the pali words are derived. But it doesnt list them for every Pali word. Also the DPD is fairly accurate as well.
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Thank you very much for this
I guess the Theravadans would have the deepest understanding behind the word images, but I feel like Sanskrit and other Prakrit would be helpful too.
I shouldn’t thought of asking this, instead.
If you were training someone to learn Pali deeply, where would you point them? I do memorization exercises now (learning the Metta, figure I would work on the heart of my own issues while making learning fun) but I just need a direction to go.
I’m learning the scriptures to help my walk on the path, so that’s what I want.
It depends on what you would like to achieve. Do you want to get a better understanding of the lexicon and its etymology (as I thought you would judging from your first post) or do you generally wish to study the language more in-depth and improve your Pali skills? It would be good to know a bit more about your prior language learning experiences in order to help you with your query. There are also some older threads you might want to check out via the search function.
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I’m more interested in the meaning right now.
I read Bhikku Sujato’s translation alongside the Pali (love that feature, btw). It’s kinda like Latin, but I can’t get a handle on some of these suffixes and prefixes to find the roots. Maybe I’m rusty on my declensions
Let me explain one approach to study Pali with an example for why that approach (although it is difficult) is best for Pali knowledge and for anyone who is serious about studying the original stuff.
Consider the noun stem ‘tri’ (meaning ‘three’ in English) in Sanskrit, it inflects as trayas in masculine, tisras in feminine and trīṇi in neuter. If you are wondering why they are all in the plural, it is called nitya-bahuvacana (i.e. Sanskrit has 3 numbers singular, dual & plural, and three being naturally always plural, it does not inflect in singular and dual). Now take the masculine form trayas and compound it with the word for ten (daśa) - you get trayas+daśa which due to Sandhi becomes → trayo-daśa (the word for thirteen, literally “3 and 10”).
Now look at the Pāli words for thirteen → ‘terasa’ or ‘tedasa’ or ‘teḷasa’. If you studied only Pāli, and read the dictionary entries for these 3 words all meaning ‘thirteen’ your knowledge of this word would stop right there and go no further, but assuming you knew your Sanskrit (like in the paragraph above) well enough, you are at-once able to work-out (with the additional knowledge that sanskrit complex syllable ‘tr’ usually simplifies in Pali to ‘tt’, with the first t further elided at the start of words; sanskrit ‘aya-’ phonetically usually transforms to ‘-e-’ in Pali, and all 3 sibilants ś, ṣ & s of Sanskrit become s in pali) that therefore Sanskrit trayas = Pali te; so Sanskrit trayo-daśa → Pāli te-dasa. However the presence of an ‘r’ in the Sanskrit trayo makes a comeback in the Pali by sometimes changing the ‘d’ into an ‘r’, so we get the Pali lexical variant terasa. Sometimes the r in the Sanskrit form causes the d of dasa to become ḍ rather than r, but ḍ between vowels does not normally stay as ḍ in Pali, it becomes ḷ, so you get the 3rd lexical variant in Pali - teḷasa.
It has taken me several minutes to describe all these phonetical and morphological processes here, which is how you learn it when you are new to it all, but if I saw the word teḷasa when I was reading a paragraph in Pali, all of this knowledge would spring up at once in my mind (along with the etymological knowledge of all the remaining words in the paragraph) and I would read Pali like I read English, with no difficulty except for the most obscure words. So that is why I say to anyone who wants to learn Pali, start with Sanskrit first (or do it simultaneously like I did). It is hard to begin with but it gets easier and easier when the foundations are well laid.
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Yeah, I can relate to that. I identified two major problems reading Pali compared to Latin:
- Vowel distribution: Compared to languages like Latin where there is a somewhat fair distribution of all vowels, Pali favours the"a". When reading, we (human beings) move our eyes constantly back and forth, trying to ‘catch’ units of meaning (e.g. words). It’s easier to recognize these when they are cleary distinguishable.
and then in addition
- crazy compounds: Have you studied the compounds? Compounding in Pali is crazy - anything can compound anything and there are compounds within compounds.
These two feautures combined did a good job teaching me humility trying to dissect them even though I’m quite used to recognizing inflections. In the beginning every other word kinda looked like sambhavanalakkhanalokacarati (I made that up obviously) 
So, a good foundation would be nice to have - Sanskrit, a better understanding of the roots - all of which would require putting a lot of time into it 
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Don’t get me started 
. Did my thing as I normally do with the Mettasutta and got steadily blindsided for forty lines (still haven’t memorized the last two stanzas).
That’s actually what prompted me to initiate this question.
But I would be lying if I didn’t say it added to the charm of learning Pali
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I could almost hear Mara laughing as I saw “sulahukavutti” “rassakāṇukathūlā” and whatnot and as I’m cracking open the compounds and then, after memorizing the Sutta Central text, I see different constructions on Leigh Brasington’s comparative translation.
Then I laughed with Mara because it is rather funny watching myself get flummoxed by these things
Number one Pali learning rule: don’t start with Gatha/verses, or be prepared for frustration.
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Just imagining the training and skill and dedication of the ancient recitators is humbling. L
Sounds so beautiful when I nail down the meter and pronunciation tho - sabbe sattā bhavantu sukhitattā sounds so lovely and feels like cool water on hot iron after all the stress of the day. Sometimes the only thing I can anchor onto for mindfulness with all the political violence and stuff in my area this past week or two. That’s a different conversation tho
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Just being able to chant the Metta Sutta is a challenge for me. It’s not so much the compounds but the tricky metre that causes me difficulty - I’ve had to mark up my copy to keep track of the short and long syllables. And then, just as I’m getting comfortable, the metre changes for the last verse and it’s a train wreck again… 
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Have you tried Wiktionary? I haven’t used it for Pali much, but in some cases at least it’ll take you from the Pali to the Sanskrit root, and then back to the Proto-Indo-European. You can even see what other words in various languages are derived from the same PIE root.
So one can go, for example, from Pali bhavati to Sanskrit भवति (bhávati), to PIE *bʰuH-, and then forward to Ancient Greek φυτόν (plant, tree, creature, child, descendant).
It’s very cool. I’ve spent many an hour rabbitholing on Wiktionary!
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Them and wisdomlib come up a lot
I wanna ask a friend if he can make me a search script- these browser algorithms are useless- I don’t like using AI
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PIE is an artificial language, and its words therefore don’t count as proper etymology for any IE language. It is a best-guess model standing for what the parent Indo-European might have been like; but there is more that we don’t know about the parent IE language than what we do know, so no reconstruction can bring most of its historical accuracy back to us, so no historical IE language’s etymology “goes-back” to PIE, PIE is a modern invention. The relationship between PIE and IE is sort of like Pali itself I guess - which is an artificial EBT-only linguistic register based on a real underlying dialect of spoken Old-Indic.
Thanks for your input.
My understanding is that PIE is a reconstructed language, and that artificial languages are something entirely different.
I’m puzzled by what you say about PIE etymologies not counting as “proper etymology.” Well-regarded dictionaries commonly include PIE roots, and linguists refer to them all the time. I doubt that, for example, the distinguished linguists who are putting together the Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series, would be particularly impressed by the argument that what they’re doing isn’t “proper etymology.” But perhaps you know something they don’t.
Anyway, I was only informing @Bearofmediocrenews of a resource that might help him explore the etymologies he was interested in. So there’s really no need to reply further.
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