Hi there, I’m trying to take a look at this specific document in particular but there are certain Pali/Sanskrit words that when I try to search up just aren’t there? I do know that Pali is quite a tonal language but it’d be nice if I had some advice from any long time readers/speakers of the language that could possibly provide some advice so I can properly differentiate it?
I am planning to take a look at A.K Warder’s Introduction to Pali to help me give an introduction to the language itself so I can more intuitively understand it. But as per the nature of the language itself being tonal, I’m still unable to see how people specifically differentiate it or if this is considered just part of the learning process in the book.
I’m quite new to this so I do apologize if the premise of the question may be lacking in specificity.
Would appreciate any advice whatsoever in this regard, thank you.
I don’t understand how Pāli being a tonal language has anything to do with it… Can you give a few concrete examples of the kind of words you can’t find?
The pdf in question seems to have Pāli, Sanskrit and Burmese words at different times. It can be confusing if you can’t tell one from another. Perhaps you’re trying to find Burmese words in Pāli / Sanskrit dictionaries?
Your confusion arises because Pāli is not a tonal language.
Thai is a tonal language and when Thai people read Pāli in their alphabet they will read it as having the tones the syllables would have if they were unaccented Thai syllables. But this is just Thai people projecting their current phonetics back.
Burmese is also, a tonal language. Maybe this is where the confusion is coming from, as you linked a Burmese document. The same would apply as what Bhante Khemarato wrote above.
It is also worth noting that Burmese Pali pronunciation, is wildly different from standard (non-burmese?) Pali pronunciation regarding consonants. Burmese pronounce ‘ca’ as the aleoval-fricative ‘sa’ where as in all other renditions of pali it is tʃa. There are other morphed consonants such as ja which I can’t remember now. For standard pali phonology see this wikipedia article.
And Sinhala is not a tonal language! Which may be why many consider Sinhala pronunciation to be more “authentic.”
Pali is a highly inflected language (more like German than English) so the shape of words in a text will be different than the shape in a dictionary. But the Digital Pali Reader fixes that by linking up all possible shapes in the dictionary. This is built into SuttaCentral’s click to look up feature.
If you are having a hard time spelling the words you hear, you want to be using a digital lookup that does a fuzzy search. It can be difficult to hear the aspirated consonants (ta vs tha, etc.) as well a double consonants (ta vs tta, etc). And some are nearly impossible to distinguish (la vs ḷa, ṇa vs na). If you are using paper dictionaries, then you just have to check all possible permutations.
It’s not just the lack of tones. Sinhala also has most of the consonant variants: retroflex, aspirations, vocalized, unaspirated, etc which are hard for Thai (and English!) speakers to even hear let alone reproduce.
Except for aspirated consonants and retroflex nasals/labials. They exist in the alphabet but not in modern spoken Sinhala. Which basically means they are the primary source for spelling errors. Or difficulties looking up words, which brings us back to the OP’s issue (maybe).
The lack of aspirated consonants often leads to an overcorrection when using the Latin alphabet. So you’ll see rather confusing spellings like “mettha”.
Sinhala-speaking monastics do actually use a variety of musical tones (including quarter tones), but I can’t work out whether there is a specific method to it (unlike Thai monastics, where, as has been noted above, it’s obvious they are just using Thai tone rules). Apart from the (to me) random tones, and the slightly different pronunciation of the short “a” at the end of words (tassa sounds like “tas-ser” to my ear), when we chant the Karaniya Metta Sutta, my (rather inexpert) Thai-based chanting doesn’t seem to clash too badly…
That’s actually not an over correction. It relates to the lack of dental fricatives in Sinhala. This is why Sinhala speakers will often say “tink tots” instead of “think thoughts”. To them, both English dental fricatives sound like the Sinhala dental consonants. So when they spell Sinhala words in English they write the Sinhala/Pali ṭ as t and Sinhala/Pali t as th. From the stand point of purely tongue position it makes perfect sense.
Because they are not trying to give a one to one correspondence between Sinhala letters and English letters but rather the equivalency they hear between spoken Sinhala and English, there is no need to ever notate aspirated consonants—because they don’t exist in spoken Sinhala
It’s like the reverse problem of English speakers pronouncing “Theravada” like “therapy”. Or the way that a native English speaker can’t distinguish between ṭ and t.
Absolutely. They also have short and long e and o, which is why you will often see ō and ē in Sri Lankan published books with Pali.
And back to the OP…
There isn’t. If you get 10 different Sinhala monks together you are likely to have 11 different chanting styles. Unless the group prioritizes chanting in unison.
Would this be what scripts are utilized for? If so what is the “standard” script dubbed? Since if it wasn’t tonal I just don’t quite understand how so many scripts where Buddhism has quite a majority in to utilize them? Like if Pali isn’t tonal, what version exactly? Would it be what the Roman script is utilized for?
The advice has been quite useful but that doesn’t really explain why I can’t seem to find well, anything in regards to Burmese scripts not being tonal? Do apologize if this frustrates anybody I’m just really confused why people keep saying Pali isn’t tonal.
Since well I’ve gotten admissions that Burmese and Thai versions of Pali are tonal so..wouldn’t that mean Pali is tonal? I even received an entire chart mapping Pali consonants to Latin orthography which is just, more confusing since, why are we fusing two languages like that? Pali and Latin are suppose to serve two completely different purposes why are we fusing them wouldn’t we be diluting the original purpose for both languages? Plus it’s not as though Christianity uses a fused version of Pali with Latin either so it’s obviously not useful at all so why use it for Buddhism?
There isn’t a standard script. Pāli has been written down using various scripts. For Roman script, it is necessary to add diacritical marks to distinguish, for example, short and long vowels (for example “a” and “ā”), or more obscure annotations such as “ṁ”. The guide here may be helpful: Pronunciation | A Chanting Guide | ebook on dhammatalks.org
Other scripts (such as Thai) have a richer set of vowels (short and long) and consonants (aspirated and non-aspirated), so they require fewer additional annotations and conventions.
Furthermore, since Thai belongs to a Southern Chinese language group, it is a tonal language. Pāli, on the other hand is an Indo-European language, and does not have tones. The tones in Thai are largely implied by the particular combinations of consonants and vowels (though these may be modified by tone-mark annotations). So when a Thai person reads Pāli in Thai script, they naturally apply the tone rules.
I hope this helps. It can certainly be very confusing.
I think one point of confusion is the distinction between a language and a script. Pali is a language, and unlike for example Chinese or Burmese or Thai, doesn’t have its own script. So the language Pali can be represented in various scripts; Latin script is just one of them.
Although Latin is also a language, this is not what we are talking about here. Latin script is used for many different languages, like English, German, French, Italian, and many more. This does not mean that all these people are communicating in Latin language.
So Latin script can also be used to write Pali, and this is useful for all those for whom this is the script they are used to. For Thai or Burmese people, it is more useful to write Pali in their own script because that’s what they are used to. On SuttaCentral you can select from a variety of scrips to represent Pali, look in the “view” options. It’s always the same Pali language, just represented by a different script.
As has been pointed out by others, each script has certain implications as to pronunciation, Latin script for example requires a lot of diacritical marks; Burmese script implies a tonality that Pali doesn’t actually have. There might be more such things for other kinds of scripts.
I think that you are confusing orthography and phonology.
Orthography is, in simple terms, the way that sounds are written down to convey meaning. In the time of the Buddha the teachings were a purely spoken and not written down. They were spoken in a Magadhi -like language which has morphed into the religious language we now call Pāli. What we know of languages spoken in the area around Bihar is that they are not tonal. Pali has no native orthography, its earliest orthographies are the Sinhala script and Brahmi script.
Phonology is about the way that we make sounds with our mouths. Such as which part of our mouth we make the sound, whether it’s voiced or unvoiced etc… and tones. We have a handy system for representing these sounds called the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), which represents sounds across all languages, including sounds which you do not hear in Western European languages. Things like the clicks of African languages, for example. IPA has a way to represent tones. The chart I linked above gives the corresponding IPA for pali written in Roman orthography. However that orthography could be any other script. For example:
all represent the same sound in their relative scripts and are represented by the IPA kɐ, which is different from the Roman ka.
You can see the IPA for the Burmese letters in the same Wikipedia article I linked.
As Venerable Khemarato said in his response, it has become standardised in Thailaind to use certain tones, when voicing certain phonemes which make up Pali words. The same would be true in Burmese representation of Pali. However, they aren’t necessarily going to be the same tones across Thai and Burmese, due to the languages having different kinds and numbers of tones. So while there may be a correct way to intonate those sounds in Burmese, it’s not THE correct way and not aligned with how the people in the time of the Buddha spoke.
Hopefully someone has mapped Burmese tones the way that Ven Khemarato has mapped Thai tones can contribute to this conversation.
Most of the Tibeto-Burman languages spoken in places like Nagaland and Arunachal Pradesh have a two-tone or three-tone system.
One Indo-Aryan language: modern Punjabi. Old Punjabi was non-tonal, but its speakers evolved a three-tone system between the 14th and 16th centuries to provide clarity after the loss of certain voiced aspirates.
If the OP were asking about tones as in pitch-accents, Classical and Vedic Sanskrit, Indo-Iranian and Indo-European all had pitch-accents (as did some other early Vedic-era Indo-European languages like Mycenaean Greek, Hittite etc), the pitches of syllables could modify word meanings as for example indicate whether a compound should be treated as tatpuruṣa or bahuvrīhi. In this respect Indo-Aryan is quite a conservative descendant of Indo-European as the pitch accents of Indo-European didnt remain in many of the other IE sub-families.
In that case Pali would be one of the earliest Indo-Aryan languages that didnt have such a pitch accent.
This pitch-accent applied to vowels and is called svara in Vedic/Sanskrit, sara in Pali – and chanting some of the most archaic Pali poems (the atthakavagga) with svaras is mentioned in the Pali Canon by the term sarabhañña (“reciting with accents/tones”), so the spoken language underlying Pali may have well inherited the accents from Early Vedic just like in Classical Sanskrit but nothing more is mentioned about it in the later Pali texts of the canon that are predominantly in prose.
My native languages are Burmese and English. Appreciate the clarification. But you still haven’t answered as to why the same treatment isn’t necessarily historically been used for Christianity or Christian texts by fusing Pali with Latin but is then suddenly used for Buddhism?
So, the Latin script is assumed to be the standard? Why is that exactly? And the only reason I talked about the various mappings of Latin to Pali was because I was deliberately provided a chart mapping the Thai Pali consonants to the Latin orthography and I just didn’t see how that was related? The definition I was given in regards to what orthography was that "it was “in simple terms, the way that sounds are written down to convey meaning.”, it just seemed awfully contradictory to fuse those, do hope this clears up why I was asking in the first place.
And in regards to your statement "Latin script is used for many different languages, like English, German, French, Italian, and many more. This does not mean that all these people are communicating in Latin language.” - with this logic wouldn’t we be essentially saying everybody that is speaking Pali isn’t speaking Pali just because they’re using different scripts? Since well if this is the case, what counts as “Pali” and what doesn’t?
I am not sure if this is the right way to put it. When Europeans encountered the Pali texts, they developed a way to represent them with the script they use for their own languages. Ever since Buddhist texts have been written down, people have written them in the script they had at hand. The Pali language doesn’t have its own script.
Basically, a “script” is a system that represents audible sounds in visual forms. If you speak a language, you can hear the sounds. If you want to write something down, you need a method which encodes the sounds in a form visible to the eyes. So, if you want, a “script” is a “translator” between two different sense spheres, the audible and the visual.
But the exact relation between how a word is spelled in a certain script and how it is pronounced by a speaker is not a law of nature. It is a convention developed by the speakers of a certain language. If you take for example the name of the French city of “Paris”, French speakers, German speakers, and English speakers each pronounce it in a different way; although they all use the same script for writing it, Latin, and spell it the same way, it sounds different.
I am sorry, I don’t know what that chart is, and I have never learned a language that uses another script but Latin, so am not really competent to speak about Thai.
I also don’t know what you mean by “fuse”, so probably I don’t really understand your question.
The script is not the language. As I said, a script is a way to make the audible sounds of a language visible to the eye.
The word “Latin” is used both for a language and for a script. The language isn’t actively spoken nowadays, but partially used as a liturgical language in Christian liturgy, or as an academic language for example for medical specialist terms.
The script is used in many modern languages. For example the English word “farmer” has the same meaning as the Latin word “agricola”, the German word “Bauer”, and the French word “fermier”. All these words are written in Latin script, that means the writing uses the same system of letters of the alphabet like “a”, “b”, “c”, etc., but the rules how words are composed, how sentences are put together, how the words are pronounced, etc., are specific for each language.
With Pali we have the opposite situation: while with Latin, one script is used for many languages, with Pali we have one language which can be written in many scripts. As mentioned above, wherever people have been interested in the Pali canon, they have found ways to write the texts down using their own scripts. The meaning is the same each time, even if the look may be VERY different! (To get an idea how different, you can open a sutta page on SuttaCentral and try out different Pali scripts in the “views” options.)
And just like the word “Paris” sounds different when pronounced by different speakers, Pali words may sound different to a certain degree when pronounced by speakers of different languages. This does not change the meaning, though, and it is always the same language, Pali.
Which may be why many consider Sinhala pronunciation to be more “authentic.”