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Welcome to the new sub-forum! As I'm sure you've all noticed by now, no matter what you read about Buddhism, there are terms and words in languages that are certainly not English. Of course the reason for keeping these original words and phrases are because of an inability to accurately translate them into English. Sanskrit and Chinese, after all, have great potential over English for nuances of meaning.

The purpose of this sub-forum is to bring up some of that terminology, explore its origin, meaning, and contemporary context; as well as to expand our understanding of all the cultures, histories and languages that have allowed Buddhism to come to and flourish in the West.

Navigation:
♥ 1. Introduction
♥ 2. Buddhist Languages
♥ 3. Sanskrit and Pāli
♥ 4. The Chinese Languages
♥ 5. Tibetan
♥ 6. Korean and Japanese
♥ 7. English

★ Sanskrit
The adjective saṃskṛta- means "refined, consecrated, sanctified". The language referred to as saṃskṛtā vāk "the refined language" has by definition always been a "high" language, used for religious and learned discourse and contrasted with the languages spoken by the people. It is also called deva-bhāṣā meaning "language of the gods". The oldest surviving Sanskrit grammar is Pāṇini's Aṣṭādhyāyī ("Eight-Chapter Grammar") dating to ca. the 5th century BC. It is essentially a prescriptive grammar, i.e., an authority that defines (rather than describes) correct Sanskrit, although it contains descriptive parts, mostly to account for Vedic forms that had already passed out of use in Panini's time.

Sanskrit belongs to the Indo-Aryan sub-family of the Indo-European family of languages. Together with the Iranian languages it belongs to the Indo-Iranian branch and as such is part of the Satem group of Indo-European languages, which also includes the Balto-Slavic branch.

When the term arose in Southern India, "Sanskrit" was not thought of as a specific language set apart from other languages, but rather as a particularly refined or perfected manner of speaking. Knowledge of Sanskrit was a marker of social class and educational attainment and was taught mainly to Brahmins through close analysis of Sanskrit grammarians such as Pāṇini. Sanskrit as the learned language of Ancient India thus existed alongside the Prakrits (vernaculars), which evolved into the modern Indo-Aryan languages (Hindi/Urdu, Bengali etc.). Most of the Dravidian languages of India, despite being a separate linguistic family by their own right, are highly influenced by Sanskrit, especially in terms of loanwords. Kannada, Telugu and Malayalam have the highest incidence of loans while Tamil has the lowest. This influence of Sanskrit on these languages is recognized by the notions of Tat Sama (equivalent) and Tat Bhava (rooted in). Sanskrit itself has also been exposed to Dravidian substratum influence in ancient times.

★ Vedic Sanskrit
Sanskrit, as defined by Pāṇini, had evolved out of the earlier "Vedic" form, and scholars often distinguish Vedic Sanskrit and Classical or "Paninian" Sanskrit as separate dialects. However, they are extremely similar in many ways and differ mostly in a few points of phonology, vocabulary, and grammar. Classical Sanskrit can therefore be considered a seamless evolution of the earlier Vedic language. Vedic Sanskrit is the language of the Vedas, a large collection of hymns, incantations, and religio-philosophical discussions which form the earliest religious texts in India and the basis for much of the Hindu religion. Modern linguists consider the metrical hymns of the Rigveda Samhita to be the earliest, composed by many authors over centuries of oral tradition. The end of the Vedic period is marked by the composition of the Upanishads, which form the concluding part of the Vedic corpus in the traditional compilations. The current hypothesis is that the Vedic form of Sanskrit survived until the middle of the first millennium BC. It is around this time that Sanskrit began the transition from a first language to a second language of religion and learning, marking the beginning of the Classical period.

Hinduism believes that the language of the Vedas is eternal and revealed in its wording and word order. Evidence for this belief is found in the Vedas itself, where in the Upanishads they are described as the very "breath of God" (niḥśvāsitam brahma). The Vedas are therefore considered "the language of reality", so to speak, and are unauthored, even by God, the rishis or seers ascribed to them being merely individuals gifted with a special insight into reality with the power of perceiving these eternal sounds. At the beginning of every cycle of creation, God himself "remembers" the order of the Vedic words and propagates them through the rishis. Orthodox Hindus, while accepting the linguistic development of Sanskrit as such, do not admit any historical stratification within the Vedic corpus itself.

This belief is of significant consequence in Indian religious history, as the very sacredness and eternality of the language encouraged exact memorization and transmission and discouraged textual learning via written propagation (see: Apaurusheyatva). Each word is believed to have innate and eternal meaning and, when properly pronounced, mystic expressive power. Erroneous learning of repetition of the Veda was considered a grave sin with potentially immediate negative consequences. Consequently, Vedic learning by rote was encouraged and prized, particularly among Brahmins, where learning of one's own Vedic texts was a mandated duty.

★ Sanskrit and Other Languages
Sanskrit and related languages have also influenced their Sino-Tibetan-speaking neighbors to the north through the spread of Buddhist texts in translation. Buddhism was spread to China by Mahayanist missionaries mostly through translations of Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit and Classical Sanskrit texts, and many terms were transliterated directly and added to the Chinese vocabulary. (Although Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit is not Sanskrit, properly speaking, its vocabulary is substantially the same, both because of genetic relationship, and because of conscious imitation on the part of composers. Buddhist texts composed in Sanskrit proper were primarily found in philosophical schools like the Madhyamaka.)



★ Pāli
The word Pāli itself signifies "line" or "(canonical) text", and this name for the language seems to have its origins in commentarial traditions, wherein the "Pāli" (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.

Pāli is a literary language of the Prakrit language family; it is not now (and never was) an informal, spoken language, in the sense of a mother tongue. Despite excellent scholarship on this problem, there is persistent confusion as to the inter-relation of Pāli to the vernacular of ancient Magadhi.

Pāli was considered by early Buddhists to be linguistically similar to Old Magadhi or even a direct continuation of that language. Many Theravada sources refer to the Pāli language as “Magadhan” or the “language of Magadha”. However, Magadhi of Asoka's inscriptions is an Eastern Indian language whereas Pāli most closely resembles Western Indian inscriptions. There are many remarkable analogies between Pali and an old form of Magadhi, - Ardhamagadhi (Half Magadhi), which is preserved in ancient Jain texts. Ardhamagadhi differs from Magadhi proper on similar points as Pali. For example, Ardhamagadhi too does not change r into l, and in the noun inflexion it shows the ending -o instead of Magadhic -e at least in many metrical places. This similarity is not accidental, since the founder of Jain religion Mahavira preached in the same area (Magadha) as Buddha Gotama.

Oskar von Hinuber has suggested that Pāli may have originated as a form of lingua franca or trade language used at the time of the Ashokan Empire. By the time of the spread of Buddhism to Sri Lanka (by missionaries sent by King Ashoka (Aśoka), according to Buddhist sources), Pāli was a significant enough literary language that it had already been used to record the complete Tipitaka. After the Pāli Canon was transmitted to Sri Lanka, it continued to be preserved entirely in Pāli, while the commentarial tradition that accompanied it (according to the information provided by Buddhaghosa) was translated into Sinhalese and preserved in local languages for several generations.

However it was ultimately supplanted by Sanskrit as a literary and religious language following the formulation of Classical Sanskrit by the scholar Panini in India. In Sri Lanka, Pāli is thought to have entered into a period of decline around the 5th Century (as Sanskrit rose in prominence), but ultimately survived. The work of Buddhaghosa was largely responsible for its reemergence as an important scholarly language in Buddhist thought. The Visuddhimagga and the other commentaries that Buddhaghosa compiled codified and condensed the Sinhalese commentarial tradition that had been preserved and expanded in Sri Lanka since the 3rd Century.

Today Pāli is studied mainly to gain access to Buddhist scriptures, and is frequently chanted in a ritual context. The secular literature of Pāli historical chronicals, medical texts, and inscriptions, is also of great historical importance. The great centers of Pāli learning remain in the Theravada nations of South-East Asia: Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia. Pāli scholarship in Northern India generally ended with the rise of the Sena dynasty, with an uncertain process of decline in peninsular India, perhaps lasting the longest in Orissa, i.e., eventually ending (along with Buddhist practice itself) with the fall of the last resistance to the expanding Muslim empires on the subcontinent. Since the 19th century, various societies for the revival of Pāli studies in India have promoted awareness of the language and its literature, perhaps most notably the Maha Bodhi Society founded by Anagarika Dhammapala.

In Europe, the Pali Text Society has been a major force in promoting the study of Pāli by Western scholars since its founding in 1881. Based in the United Kingdom, the society publishes romanised Pāli editions, along with many English translations of these sources. The Pali Text Society was in part founded to compensate for the very low level of funds allocated to Indology in late 19th century England; incongruously, the English were not nearly so robust in Sanskrit and Prakrit language studies as Germany, Russia and even Denmark—a situation that many would say continues to this day. Without the inspiration of colonial holdings such as the former British occupation of Sri Lanka and Burma, institutions such as the Danish Royal Library have built up major collections of Pāli manuscripts, and major traditions of Pāli studies.

★ Pāli and Sanskrit
Although Pāli cannot be considered a direct descendant of either Classical Sanskrit or of the older Vedic dialect, the languages are obviously very closely related and the common characteristics of Pāli and Sanskrit were always easily recognized by those in India who were familiar with both. Indeed, a very large proportion of Pāli and Sanskrit word-stems are identical in form, differing only in details of inflection.

The connections were sufficiently well-known that technical terms from Sanskrit were easily converted into Pāli by a set of conventional phonological transformations. These transformations mimicked a subset of the phonological developments that had occurred in Proto-Pāli. Because of the prevalence of these transformations, it is not always possible to tell whether a given Pāli word is a part of the old Prakrit lexicon, or a transformed borrowing from Sanskrit. The existence of a Sanskrit word regularly corresponding to a Pāli word is not always secure evidence of the Pāli etymology, since, in some cases, artificial Sanskrit words were created by back-formation from Prakrit words.

Navigation:
♥ 1. Introduction
♥ 2. Buddhist Languages
♥ 3. Sanskrit and Pali
♥ 4. The Chinese Languages
♥ 5. Tibetan
♥ 6. Japanese and Korean
♥ 7. English

★ Tibetan

In Tibet and the Himalayas, we find two major language families: Sino-Tibetan, represented by the Tibeto-Burman sub-family, which includes the different varieties of Tibetan; and Indo-European, which includes languages such as Nepali, Assamese, Hindi-Urdu. Apart from these two major language families, Turkic and Mongolic languages are also spoken on the Tibetan Plateau. In addition to having languages with rich literary traditions such as Tibetan, Newari and Nepali, this region also has dozens of vibrant spoken languages.

The Tibetan script is an abugida of Indic origin used to write the Tibetan language as well as the Dzongkha language, Ladakhi language and sometimes the Balti language. The printed form of the script is called uchen script (Tibetan: དབུ་ཅན་; Wylie: dbu-can; "with a head") while the hand-written cursive form used in everyday writing is called umé script (Tibetan: དབུ་མེད་; Wylie: dbu-med; "headless"). Besides Tibet, the writing system is also used in Bhutan and in parts of India and Nepal.

The script is romanized in a variety of ways, this article employs the Wylie transliteration system.

The creation of the Tibetan script is traditionally ascribed to Thonmi Sambhota in the mid-7th century. However, no Old Tibetan texts mention such a person. The Tibetan script was most likely introduced for administrative purposes in 650 (the first dated year in the Old Tibetan Annals).

The form of the letters is based on an Indic alphabet of that period, but which specific Indic script inspired the Tibetan alphabet remains controversial.

Although the Tibetan script is assumed to accurately reflect the pronunciation of Tibetan at the time of its invention, in all modern dialects, in particular Lhasa, the pronuncation and spelling differ significantly, due to phonetic change. This is why some people are in favour of transliterating Tibetan "as it is pronounced". One thus often sees Kagyu instead of Bka'-rgyud.

The Tibetan script has 30 consonants, which are deemed to possess an inherent sound a. The vowels are a, i, u, e, o. As in other Indic scripts, each consonant letter includes an inherent a, and the other vowels are indicated by marks; thus ཀ ka, ཀི ki, ཀུ ku, ཀེ ke, ཀོ ko. Old Tibetan included a gigu 'verso' of uncertain meaning. There is no distinction between long and short vowels in written Tibetan, except in loanwords, especially transcribed from the Sanskrit.

Navigation:
♥ 1. Introduction
♥ 2. Buddhist Languages
♥ 3. Sanskrit and Pāli
♥ 4. The Chinese Languages
♥ 5. Tibetan
♥ 6. Japanese and Korean
♥ 7. English

★ English
English is an Anglo-Frisian language brought to southeastern Great Britain in the 5th century AD and earlier by Germanic settlers and Germanic auxiliary troops from various parts of northwest Germany (Saxons, Angles) as well as Jutland (Jutes).

The extent of Germanic immigration to Britain during Roman supremacy there is unknown, but substantial, as Germanic auxiliary troops were continually recruited outside and settled within the borders of the Empire, Britain being no exception to this rule. Thus, the Germanic roots of English in Britain may go back to the 2nd Century A.D. or even earlier.

The original Old English language was subsequently influenced by two successive waves of invasion. The first was by speakers of languages in the Scandinavian branch of the Germanic family, who colonised parts of the British Isles in the eighth and ninth centuries. The second wave was of the Normans in the eleventh century, who spoke Norman (an oïl language closely related to French).

While modern scholarship considers most of the story to be legendary and politically motivated, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle reported that around the year 449, Vortigern, a legendary king of the Brythons, invited the Angles to help him against the Picts (of modern-day Scotland). In return, the Angles were granted lands in the southeast and far north of England. Further aid was sought, and in response came Saxons, Angles, and Jutes. The Chronicle talks of a subsequent influx of settlers who eventually established seven kingdoms.

These Germanic invaders dominated the original Celtic-speaking inhabitants, whose languages survived in areas not under Germanic domination: Scotland, Wales, Brittany, Cornwall, and Ireland. The dialects spoken by the invaders dominated almost all of what is now called England and formed what is today called the Old English language, which resembled some coastal dialects in what are now northwest Germany and the Netherlands (i.e. Frisia). Later, it was influenced by the related North Germanic language Old Norse, spoken by the Vikings who settled mainly in the north and the east coast down to London, the area known as the Danelaw.

Then came the Norman Conquest of England in 1066. For about 300 years following, the Norman kings and the high nobility spoke only Anglo-Norman, which was very close to Old French. A large number of Norman words found their way into Old English, leaving a parallel vocabulary that persists into modern times. The Norman influence strongly affected the evolution of the language over the following centuries, resulting in what is now referred to as Middle English.

During the 15th century, Middle English was transformed by the Great Vowel Shift, the spread of a standardised London-based dialect in government and administration, and the standardising effect of printing. Modern English can be traced back to around the time of William Shakespeare.

The English language belongs to the western sub-branch of the Germanic branch, which is itself a branch of the Indo-European family of languages.

The question as to which is the nearest living relative of English is a matter of some discussion. Apart from such English-lexified creole languages such as Tok Pisin, Scots — which is spoken primarily in Scotland and parts of Northern Ireland — is the Germanic variety most closely associated with English. Like English, Scots ultimately descends from Old English, also known as Anglo-Saxon. The closest relative to English after Scots is Frisian, which is spoken in the Northern Netherlands and Northwest Germany. Other less closely related living West Germanic languages include German itself, Low German, Dutch and Afrikaans. The North Germanic languages of Scandinavia are less closely related to English than the West Germanic languages.

Many French words are also intelligible to an English speaker (though pronunciations are often quite different) because English absorbed a large vocabulary from French, via the Norman after the Norman Conquest and directly from French in further centuries. As a result, a substantial share of English vocabulary is quite close to French, with some minor spelling differences (word endings, use of old French spellings, etc.), as well as occasional divergences in meaning.

Navigation:
♥ 1. Introduction
♥ 2. Buddhist Languages
♥ 3. Sanskrit and Pāli
♥ 4. The Chinese Languages
♥ 5. Tibetan
♥ 6. Japanese and Korean
♥ 7. English