A Middle Indo-Aryan language (Devanagari पाऴि) of north India, closely related to Sanskrit; the sacred language of the Buddhist scriptures. It has no native script, so it may be written in various alphabets, including Devanagari, Burmese, and Roman
A Middle Indo-Aryan language (Devanagari पाऴि) of north India, closely related to Sanskrit; the sacred language of the Buddhist scriptures. It has no native script, so it may be written in various alphabets, including Devanagari, Burmese, and Roman
Middle Indo-Aryan language of the 5th century BC in which the most essential documents of Theravada Buddhism are written. Linguistically, Pali is a homogenization of the northern Middle Indo-Aryan dialects in which the Buddha's teachings were orally recorded and transmitted. According to the tradition of Sri Lankan chronicles, the Theravada canon was first written down in the 1st century BC, though its oral transmission continued long afterward. No single script was ever developed for Pali; scribes used scripts of their own languages to copy canonical texts and commentaries (see Indic writing systems), and most extant palm-leaf manuscripts of Pali are of relatively recent date
A dialect descended from Sanskrit, and like that, a dead language, except when used as the sacred language of the Buddhist religion in Farther India, etc