It’s ok, you are cool and know what you are talking.
I guess it’s kinda like learning chinese characters by mindless repetitions.
Alright, speaking Pali in modern world is not really needed. I’m just thinking at least one can read, write and expressing buddhist words and thoughts in Pali without going through English, hence natural. Wait, maybe some are doing that already? Do you guys (Pali experts and scholars) able to make arbitrary sentences easily?
You are absolutely right, and this is one of those cases where mindless repetition is not bad at all. Anyway, there is a system underlying each grammar, and doing these exercises you unconsciously internalize it. It may happen consciously to an extent, but repetition is the most important part.
You can’t if English is your native language, unless you have an extensive knowledge of the old Indic culture and how these words were used in the old Pali texts. Not that you will still have to translate words into English, no, the connotations you attach to them will be influenced by English. So, in order to avoid English language games interefering with Pali texts, you’ll have to read about Ancient India and / or ancient Pali texts a lot.
Oh ya Linda, Pali is your second language, not sad at all! Further more if English is your native then you can do way better job in translating to English.
In my case it’s Chinese and English, but then I can actually switch between Chinese and English when I think. Maybe I will be able to do it in Pali? I mean the connotations I attach to the words can be of Buddha’s teaching rather than ancient India culture? Like Nibbana is just fire extinguished, fading away, etc, there’s no cultural influence.
The Buddha did not have any other language than the language of the Ancient Indic culture, he could not borrow terms from Ancient Greek or Latin, so he took appropriate words from the everyday language and infused them with new meaning. The appropriateness of a word was determined by its connotations, sometimes these connotations play a significant part in how we should understand the term doctrinally. Take the word nibidda: we are pretty sure what it means generally but we don’t know the exact connotations, so it is both translated as ‘disenchantment’ or ‘disgust’, pretty different things if you ask me.
If you know how important fire is in the Vedic culture in particular and in the ancient cultures in general, you will see new shades of meaning in that term. I highly recommend you to have a look at this paper to just evaluate how much of the meaning we don’t notice because of being completely out of touch with that culture.
The Buddha’s teaching, unless you are having a direct insight into it, should be formulated in some language and is thus inevitably embedded in a cultural context of this language. Since it was first attested in the ancient Indic culture, we should first assess this culture, apply ou conclusions to the linguistic data we have and then try to render the results in an English or Chinese term that has the highest semantic correspondence to the Pali one, including connotations and cultural associations. If that is totally impossible, you should provide the English or Pali term with a commentary clarifying the semantic nuances lying under the surface. Eventually, you will be able to use Pali terms without mentally translating them into English or Chinese, and having been thoroughly informed about the connotations of the terms, you will avoid possible culturally conditioned misinterpretations.
Words have more power than we think. For example, almost a century of bad blood between the Eastern and Western halves of the Cristian Church in the Ancient Rome were caused by the linguistic peculiarities of the terms they chose to refer to the essence and three persons of the Holy Trinity. I cannot go into detail here, but the bottom line is they are still having problems understanding each other merely because of their choice of words and their connotations about 1500 years ago.
I found a nice example of English language connotations applied to the original Buddhist ideas. In Chapter 1 of his seminal work Buddhist Precepts and Practice, Professor Gombrich describes his difficulties in translating the sentence ‘What are you religious beliefs’ into Singhalese back in the 1960-s. The closest, even though still somewhat unnaturally sounding rendering turned out to be something like ‘What are your opinions about religion?’ In other words, in the Singhalese culture religious beliefs are or at least not cogntively different from any other opinions you can have about any other matter like politics or science. While this does not tell us anything about the connotations of the Pali term saddhā directly, considering the orthodoxy of the Mahavihara tradition, close relations between the Ancient Indic and all Sri Lankan cultures and etymological relations between the Singhalese adahanavā and Pali saddhā, there is a fairly high chance of the connotations in the contemporary Singhalese and Ancient Prakrit languages being quite similar to each other. Other indirect evidence in support of this would be the possible historical origin of the Singhalese in West Indian Prakrits, with Pali showing a number of Western Indian influences and possibly even originating in the area. This is not all conclusive evidence, but it still provides us with something to work with.
The Western attitude to religious beliefs is very different. ‘I believe because it is absurd’ is an unpopular idea in the Western secular society but it is very deeply entrenched in us. It may be even one of the reasons why people with the scientific worldview are not really fond of religion. However, this cognitive attitude is a thing, and you cannot guarantee it will not mess with your understanding and use of the word saddhā when speaking Pali. That is not say that feeling warm and peaceful when thinking about Dhamma is a bad thing, on the contrary, it is a very good thing. However, we are primarily discussing renderings and connotations of Pali terms, and attaching new connotations to them can be misleading.
Admittedly, I have no knowledge about these things in the Chinese language culture, but I think you can catch my drift
Maybe this would be possible, but first it would be necessary to analyze early sources in order to determine common speech patterns.
A surprising amount can be reconstructed sometimes just from old texts. I have heard that Buddhist texts are being used to help in reconstructing vernacular Middle Chinese, so that is quite interesting.
Researchers may learn an amazing amount just from analyzing an old tooth, or some broken bones. Who knows what type of linguistic treasures may be hidden in something the size of a Buddhist canon?
For anyone interested I just heard that Prof Gombrich from the Oxford Center for Buddhist Studies (link in a post above) will be offering his 3-week intensive on-line course again in November.
Thanks for a good thread. I have been thinking about this too. I keep hoping that someone will do Pali for Duolingo. However, there were some very valid points why this might not be appropriate.
Though I do love that Duolingo ‘gamifies’ the repetitive aspects of language learning. I’ll just have to come up with my own ‘games’
I might humbly suggest that, should Pali become a living language, as a vehicle to greater understanding of the Buddha’s meaning it might suffer; that is, as a living language it would quickly transmute to the needs of the speakers as all living languages do. Just a thought. As a language teacher, I recognize and acknowledge the solid advantages of applying all skills – speaking, comprehension, writing, and reading – to language study.
it certainly would, but as exemplified by the story of Hebrew revival, knowledge of an updated form of the language still allows understanding the Hebrew Bible written in its ancient form
althought this is not about learning Pali a ‘natural’ way you described it, I’d like to hint to this method, since it respects the nature of this kind of language: Pāli by the Dowling Method
Kind Regards
P.S.: Please ignore the link to buy a book somewhere in the text. This page was not done to sell a book
M.
to learn pali like a natural language, use it everyday.
chant 30min every day in pali.
it works better if you make your own chant book with suttas you like.
then every word you take the time to learn feels worthwhile, and by chanting 30 min
every day you reinforce it until you own it, just as one would do with a natural language.
chant slow enough that you understand what your chanting, at least a sentence or phrase at a time you understand what you’re speaking. then gradually break it down until you know every single word as your chanting it. pause if you have to. on particularly hard sections, repeat that section a few times to give it extra reps.
memorize the important sutta passages. fine to start off reading from a book.
challenge yourself by chanting sections out of order. for example, every day i chant dasa dhamma sutta, 10 frequent recollections . after i memorized the 10, then i woudl chant the sequence out of order, or example, backwards 10 through one, or 1-5, then 10 down to 6, or just hold out my 10 fingers and randomly pick a finger until i worked through all 10.
challenge yourself further by chanting a sentence backwards.
gradually increase your speed until before you know it your chanting at a fluent speakers speed and understanding every word clearly as you say it.
i believe this is also an important part of the traditional training in samadhi for disciples in teh buddha’s time. this is the dynamic aspect of samadhi. in the 30 min i chant, were there any other intruding thoughts besides the meaning of each word as i was chanting it? also, becuase the chanting book is constructed of all worthwhile suttas, i’m getting deep joy, peace, as i’m chanting. factors of the 7 bojjhanga unfold quickly in real time sequence, which i believe is the primary intention of that model.
i’ve been doing this for 3 years now, and guess what? pali is a living language. pali is my lifeblood, my connection to the buddha. english, my native langauge, to me that’s the dead language, the path to death again and again.
For someone who’s mastered the basics of Pali grammar and is interested in learning spoken Pali there’s a rather nice Thai cartoon phrasebook called Kathāsallāpa. Each phrase is given in Pali in Thai script, along with Thai and English translations.
There are a few drawbacks to the work: some of the English translations are missing, some are rather poor, and the choice of phrases is rather stilted. Still, as there isn’t very much else available for anglophone would-be Pali speakers I thought I’d post the link.
and know what you are talking.
