18 Facts About Pali

Pali is a Middle Indo-Aryan liturgical language native to the Indian subcontinent.

Pali has some commonalities with both the western Ashokan Edicts at Girnar in Saurashtra, and the Central-Western Prakrit found in the eastern Hathigumpha inscription.

Nonetheless, Pali does retain some eastern features that have been referred to as Magadhisms.

In Sri Lanka, Pali is thought to have entered into a period of decline ending around the 4th or 5th century, but ultimately survived.

The earliest samples of Pali discovered are inscriptions believed to date from 5th to 8th Century located in mainland Southeast Asia, specifically central Siam and lower Burma.

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Surprisingly, the oldest surviving Pali manuscript was discovered in Nepal dating to the 9th Century.

Pali was first mentioned in Western literature in Simon de la Loubere's descriptions of his travels in the kingdom of Siam.

Pali suggests it is likely that the viharas in North India had separate collections of material, preserved in the local dialect.

Pali died out as a literary language in mainland India in the fourteenth century but survived elsewhere until the eighteenth.

Today Pali is studied mainly to gain access to Buddhist scriptures, and is frequently chanted in a ritual context.

The great centres of Pali learning remain in Sri Lanka and other Theravada nations of Southeast Asia: Myanmar, Thailand, Laos and Cambodia.

In 1869, the first Pali Dictionary was published using the research of Robert Caesar Childers, one of the founding members of the Pali Text Society.

Pali literature is usually divided into canonical and non-canonical or extra-canonical texts.

Pali is a highly inflected language, in which almost every word contains, besides the root conveying the basic meaning, one or more affixes which modify the meaning in some way.

Pali nouns inflect for three grammatical genders and two numbers.

The existence of a Sanskrit word regularly corresponding to a Pali word is not always secure evidence of the Pali etymology, since, in some cases, artificial Sanskrit words were created by back-formation from Prakrit words.

Historically, the first written record of the Pali canon is believed to have been composed in Sri Lanka, based on a prior oral tradition.

Transmission of written Pali has retained a universal system of alphabetic values, but has expressed those values in a variety of different scripts.