Stress and Intonation in Pali

Yeah, maybe a bit difficult to know much about the intonation outside of inferring a few very general things. I did a few weeks of spoken Sanskrit but dropped bcos the internet connection to India was poor. Pretty sure that our teachers used bitonal Hindi intonation. Hindi has fall (command) rise (emphasis on non sentence final content word & question), and rise fall intonation (question word). I think. Among other things.

I would have guessed this is normal across most Indian languages, so it would be surprising however if Pali had something else. I can’t be imagine being told to go (gaccha!) with rising intonation, for example. But I don’t know of any books that touch on this.

The traditional grammars normally aren’t very good with non-phonemic features. Actually, traditional Pali/Sanskrit education has been that way for a long time: the traditional methods assume you speak an Indic vernacular and just need grammar.

AFAIK Prosodic features get nearly completely lost in the Burmese and Thai chanting traditions. The Sri Lankan tradition retains stress and possibly some aspects of intonation. I used to occasionally do a bit of Mandarin singing in lay life (in addition to KTV) and in Mandarin, sometimes the tones are incorporated into the song tones. It’s very possible that the better Sri Lankan chanters have rising tone questions (I think I have heard this in Ven. Na Uyane Ariyadhamma recordings) but it may be incorporated into the chant.

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Do you mean something like having a rising “question” tone at the end of “taṁ kissa hetu?” I don’t think I’ve ever heard that in chanting before.

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Excuse me, this is a little late and slightly off-topic, but, regarding Dhammaruwan, I read somewhere once that, in addition to the chants of his you commonly find, there is a recording of him chanting the Mahānidāna Sutta somewhere. Can anyone confirm or deny?

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I think I have heard end sentence rising question tone in the recordings of Ven. Na Uyane Ariyadhamma reciting the samanera panha i.e. the general melodic line of the chanting follows natural intonation patterns (may not be exact). But that is a question word at the end of the sentence. It would sound a bit unnatural if it were falling tone on kim in dve nama kim etc.

In “taṁ kissa hetu?”, I think the tonal pattern would more naturally be rising-falling, with rising on kissa as the question word. As per the 3rd example I gave for Hindi tone pattern.

Will give it more thought after I recover from the flu. I think this is an understudied area, so I am just throwing some thoughts out there. A significant percentage of people I know are not good enough at chanting to have anything like naturallish intonation. As intonation aids comprehension, there might be a very good prescriptive argument for at least avoiding unnatural intonation patterns in the chanting.

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How is that zoom Warder group going?

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I hope the flu didn’t cause too much dukkha, Ayya.

On reflection, I don’t understand this … it seems to paraphrase as “Stress results from lengthening of the stressed vowel”, which seems a tadge tautalogical?

My understanding of stress in English is that given by Sloat, C., S.H. Taylor, & J.E. Hoard Introduction to Phonology, NJ Prentice-Hall, 1978, p71.

“In many languages, including English, some syllables within a word are relatively more prominent than others …
English syllables seem to be stressed by a combination of raised pitch and increased loudness and length.”

Sub-phonemic generally seems to be a synonym for non-phonemic used by people who think suprasegmental language features can be devoid of meaning. I don’t share this view: possibly only because I’ve not yet come across a language where this is the case. But if a type of sound is devoid of meaning, can it still be considered part of a language system? I’d say that it shouldn’t be.

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I wouldn’t paraphrase this way. In related Prakrits, stress can lead to other changes too, like erasure of final .m (think haliammi in the locative…from original -asmi.m, from memory this also occurs in BHS) I was commenting only on changes to vowel length/quality as one very noticeable aspect which is a result of stress (i.e. because it can show up in the orthography). Stress being basically the process as noted by Sloat where a syllable becomes more prominent.

The definition from Sloat et al should generally also be fine for Pali. However, I can’t comment much on loudness and pitch as this is outside of the statements found in Gieger, which is my primary source. We can prove changes in vowel quality/length in Prakrits due to stress more readily on historical grounds, but I can’t really adduce evidence for loudness and pitch. Logically, we might assume these would also be there, but it would have to again be on the basis of inference from Hindi. It’s only really Prakrit-Pali comparisons which have attracted the interest of scholars to date.

What I had meant by sub-phonemic is that the change in vowel quality shouldn’t be so great so as to alter the spelling, as a/aa for example, forms a phonemically distinct contrastive pair in Pali. I was thinking mostly just about how the spelling works in a formal sense (I didn’t invent this, btw). Some Pali textbooks printed in Sri Lanka do in fact give an additional distinct schwa value for unstressed short a but not sure I would go that far. ANYWAY not personally very concerned with whether stress is meaningful, as the difference between “sounding wrong” and actually “being wrong” is arguable. Both my Sri Lankan Pali teacher and my Sanskrit teacher always corrected for stress, there are clearly correct ways of pronouncing things in any case.

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Thank you for this. I think my difficulty in following what you said is due mainly to two things:

  1. You know much more phonology than I do, and much more about the history of the Sanskrit languages.
  2. I have been seeking something quite simple: guidance on how to read Pali prose aloud, and thus to understand syllable stress in a general sense to aid this endeavour. While, you following Geiger, are interested in stress-related features that conditioned the emergence of Pali from Sanskrit (if that is indeed what happened historically).

I looked through Geiger’s chapter on phonology but I didn’t find direct help there. Reading Did the Buddha Speak Pāli? | A Blue Chasm reminded me that there are aspects of the origin of Pali that remain unresolved among scholars.

Starting with the question if anyone ever actually spoke Pali!

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I realise that I have rather uncritically accepted Karpik’s and Gombrich’s hypothesis that he did, at least as a lingua franca for teaching in.
The idea that nobodymay have spoken Pali is a bit of a wake-up call.

Well, I’m not sure we can ever know.

I, too, find Gombrich’s compelling, though.