Pali (ISO 15919/ALA-LC: Pāḷi) is a Middle Indo-Aryan language (or prakrit) of India. It is best known as the language of the earliest extant Buddhist scriptures, as collected in the Pāḷi Canon or Tipitaka, and as the liturgical language of Theravada Buddhism.
The word Pali itself signifies "line" or "(canonical) text", and this name for the language seems to have its origins in commentarial traditions, wherein the "Pāḷi" (in the sense of the line...
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Pali (ISO 15919/ALA-LC: Pāḷi) is a Middle Indo-Aryan language (or prakrit) of India. It is best known as the language of the earliest extant Buddhist scriptures, as collected in the Pāḷi Canon or Tipitaka, and as the liturgical language of Theravada Buddhism.
The word Pali itself signifies "line" or "(canonical) text", and this name for the language seems to have its origins in commentarial traditions, wherein the "Pāḷi" (in the sense of the line of original text quoted) was distinguished from the commentary or the vernacular following after it on the manuscript page. As such, the name of the language has caused some debate among scholars of all ages; the spelling of the name also varies, being found with both long "ā" [ɑː] and short "a" [a], and also with either a retroflex [ɭ] or non-retroflex [l] "l" sound. To this day, there is no single, standard spelling of the term; all four spellings can be found in textbooks. R.C. Childers translates the word as "series" and states that the...
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