Thanks for the interesting clarifications! Just to add, while in general the Sinhala pronunciation of Pali is good, and certainly better than in any other traditional culture, it’s not perfect.
I’m no expert in Sinhala, but in addition to the issues cited, my understanding is that they omit the retroflex consonants (ḍ, ṭ, ṇ, ḷ), replacing them with standard unvoiced consonants (t, d, n, l). Meanwhile, the unvoiced consonants are spelled the same as the aspirated consonants, so my name becomes “Sujatho”.
This is merely a spelling convention, as there aren’t any true aspirated consonants in Sinhala.
In any case, this explains why we frequently see what looks to our eyes like eccentric spelling of Pali, such as sathipatthana, etc. I’ve found that some Sri Lankans—and I’m sure this applies to Thais and Burmese as well—don’t realize that there is a universally accepted global spelling convention for Pali. They think the way we spell it is the “English” way!
As a final detail. When I first heard Pali I was amazed, and could not believe that such an old language could be remembered at all. I imagined that the way it was pronounced would be just arbitrary. But I didn’t understand the detail and complexity of the ancient Indian science of linguistics.
Starting, so far as we have access to, with the work of Panini, this is one of the worlds great scientific achievements. From Wikipedia:
Pāṇini’s grammar is the world’s first formal system, developed well before the 19th century innovations of Gottlob Frege and the subsequent development of mathematical logic. In designing his grammar, Pāṇini used the method of “auxiliary symbols”, in which new affixes are designated to mark syntactic categories and the control of grammatical derivations. This technique, rediscovered by the logician Emil Post, became a standard method in the design of computer programming languages.
For more on Panini, see this article. encyclopaedia001.pdf (3.9 MB)
We know from our studies of the suttas that such linguistic sophistication predated the Buddha. In fact it developed for exactly the same reason as we are discussing now. The brahmins had ancient sacred scriptures, the Vedas, but they were so old that the language was archaic and incomprehensible. So they developed incredibly advanced linguistic analysis to maintain these ancient texts.
One aspect of this was pronunciation, which was considered to be especially important since the texts were performed orally. (We don’t know when brahmins adopted writing for the Vedas, but it was certainly long after the Buddhists.) Every syllable was considered sacred, a literal emanation from the cosmic divinity, and the slightest mistake would betray the brahmins’ sacred duty and risk upsetting the cosmic order.
Thus not only the pronunciation was defined and described, but the method of education in correct pronunciation, known simply as shiksha (Pali: sikkhā, training, education), was developed in exquisite detail.
The level of detail was carried over to the writing systems as well, which, throughout the Indic sphere, are perfectly phonetic.
These methods were adopted by Pali linguists, so we know with certainty exactly how Pali is meant to be pronounced. This is not in dispute, and Pali experts and linguists in the different Theravada countries all agree on this. The issue is that due to local influences, incorrect spellings and pronunciations become widespread in the culture.
Incidentally, the driving forces behind the Mahasangiti Pali edition we use on SuttaCentral, the so-called Dhamma Society, were well aware of this issue and wanted to reform Thai use of Pali. This is why they published their text in Roman script only, to try to get the Thais to use correct pronunciation. Oh, well.