I have no idea what scripts ancient Christian text are written in. I’m Buddhist, and despite my white skin, have never been Christian. You might need to ask this on a scholarly Christian forum.
Let’s try this again.
Pali was originally a spoken only language and it was non-tonal. When it arrived in different countries it was written in different scripts. Those scripts represent the sounds which each phoneme of pali makes. I gave an example of how the phoneme represented by the Burmese character က is represented in many different scripts. I could probably also represent this phoneme in Arabic or Cyrillic. It still makes the sound of a voiceless velar plosive with a near open central vowel. Crows make a similar noise. If you were to write the sound a crow makes down, you might write က and I might write ka or ක, as these are the two scripts that I am familliar with.
Pali was first written down in Sinhala and Brahmi scripts. If you are looking for the ‘true’ way to write Pali maybe this is as close as you’ll get. Burmese script came later. Sinhala and Brahmi are both non-tonal.
If you are a native Burmese speaker and are looking for the Burmese way to intonate Burmese characters of Pali words, then it would surely make more sense to ask a Burmese Pali scholar.
Basically, the tone does not change the meaning of the pali words. There are no duplicate words in Pali with different tones. Pali is not Burmese, or Khmer, or Thai. It is Pali, which has no tones.
Because there is no need for someone to learn a new script to be able to read Pali. Pali has always been written in different scripts depending on the local alphabet. With the international standard there is absolutely no information lost when writing Pali in the Latin alphabet. Of course one still has to know how the sounds are made for Pali, but learning a new script to do that is unnecessary.
And if someone did want to learn a new script, which should they learn? Thai? Burmese? Sinhala? Khmer? None of those are any better for representing the sounds than the standard Latin transliteration.
Colonialism is real and damaging. But people using their own alphabet now to write Pali words is not colonialism.
It is about soul not just sound. Not acknowledging the context of the script is injustice and imposition which is wrong. Specifically due to the colonial context in which it happened, if it were done in say a better time when no such thing was occuring I’d have no objections but the complete opposite happened. We are Buddhists this is what we are meant to be against are we not?
We are meant to spread the Dhamma, not gate keep it by requiring people to lean a whole new alphabet.
This thread was started as a question about Pali pronunciation. If that question has been answered, perhaps @moderators could close it and @compuhsition you could start a new thread if you have something to discuss related to the Early Buddhist Texts.
