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2008-08-02 04:07 AM -0400
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Pali language - UKT collection
Pali-lang-UKT.htm
by U Kyaw Tun, M.S. (I.P.S.T., U.S.A.). Not for sale. Prepared for
students of TIL Computing and Language Center, Yangon, MYANMAR.
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Contents of this page
This is a collection from various sources,
and will be updated or changed from time to time.
In Myanmar, whenever we speak of "language", we usually mean the written form
or the script, but in the West, it is meant the spoken form. This brings in the
unsolvable problem of choosing which form, from which place, spoken by which
group of people, to represent what we are going to call the authentic language.
For example would you say that how the people in Mandalay speak is the representative form
of Burmese? Are not the forms spoken in Arakan, in Tavoy, and in Yangon not the
Burmese language? This question of choosing which form becomes irrelevant if we
are to stick to our time-honoured adage:
{ré:tau. a.mhan/ hpat-tau.a.thän/} "what is written is correct; how it is
sounded is just sound".
We shall call the written form Myanmar, and the spoken form Burmese. In this
paper Myanmar means the script and not the spoken form. Yet, people tend to be
confused by how a particular word sounds by different peoples who speak Pali.
Pali language
Pali in Latin script
Forms [a] and [ɑ]
Pali language and myself
Geography and history
The Aryans and Ancient Indian History
UKT notes
• obstruents and sonorants (sonority hierarchy)
• phonotactics
Contents of this page
from: An Elementary Pali Course, by Ven. Narada Thera
http://www.vipassana.info/pali%20contents.htm 0807226 in Tipitaka font
www.buddhanet.net/pdf_file/ele_pali.pdf latest download 080726 is in
TIL archives.
Pali (or <Pāḷi> with diacritical marks)
{pa-Li.}
was the language spoken by the Buddha and employed by Him to expound His
Doctrine of Deliverance. Māgadhī
{ma-ga.Di}
is its real name, it being the dialect of the people of Magadha
- a
district in Central India. Pali (literarily: "line" or "text"),
is, strictly speaking, the name for the Buddhist Canon. Nowadays the term Pali is often
applied to the language in which the Buddhist texts or scriptures were written.
The Pali language must have had characters of its own, but at present they are
extinct.
UKT:
It is regrettable that some people in the West, especially non-Buddhists,
mistakenly take Pali to be the language of Bali, an island in Indonesia, where
the majority of population is of Hindu faith.
Pali is written in the script of the land: Myanmar script in Myanmar,
Sinhala in Sri Lanka and Thai in Thailand -- the three prominent Buddhist
countries where Theravada school
{hté-ra. wa-da.} of Buddhism has taken root. However, the Pali
in this paper is in Latin script (aka Roman alphabet -- not English
alphabet). To make a distinction between various Pali texts, I will designate
the text in this paper as Pali-Latin. It follows the tradition of Sri-Lanka
(formerly known as Ceylon) and is highly rhotic compared to Pali-Myanmar the
one I am familiar with.
One major difference between Pali-Latin and Pali-Myanmar is the
pronunciation of words involving Myanmar akshara (characters)
{sa.},
{tha.} and
{hta.}. Of the three,
{sa.} has
a special problem. Its pronunciation in the onset of a syllable is IPA [s],
but in the coda it is IPA [c] or IPA [ʔ] (question mark without a dot). The coda
{sa.} is written as
{c}
(without the inherent vowel) or in the "killed"
form and there is no confusion with the onset
{sa.}.
If we make this distinction between
{sa.} and
{c}, then the question whether English has a palatal [c] does not arrive.
Which pronunciation, Pali-Latin or Pali-Myanmar, is more authentic is
debatable, since there are claims that before the Aryan (language: Sanskrit)
domination of India, people living in the area where the Buddha originated
spoke Tibeto-Burman languages. Since, Burmese is a Tibeto-Burmese language,
whereas Sinhala of Sri Lanka is not, it is highly probable that Buddha's
pronunciation would be more similar to Burmese than to Sinhala
(or English).
From:
http://www.geocities.com/derekacameron/pali.html (not available in Yangon
on 080726)
Pali means “text.” Pali is the language in which the oldest texts of Buddhism
are written. In some senses it is an “artificial” language, in that these
texts contain traces of dialects from various geographic regions and various
points in time. Nevertheless, we can say that Pali is very close to the
language actually spoken by the Buddha.
Excerpt from: Lumbini -- Birthplace of Buddha
http://www.buddhanet.net/e-learning/buddhistworld/lumbini.htm 080726
"Lumbini
{loam~bi.ni} is the place where the Buddha, known as the Tathagata* was born. It
is the place which should be visited and seen by a person of devotion and which
should cause awareness and apprehension of the nature of impermanence.'
* Tathagata
{ta.hta-ga.ta.} - One who has found the Truth.
"The birthplace of the Gautama Buddha, Lumbini, is the Mecca of
every Buddhist, being one of the four holy places of Buddhism. It is said in the
Parinibbana Sutta that Buddha himself identified four places of future
pilgrimage: the sites of his birth, enlightenment, first discourse, and death.
All of these events happened outside in nature under trees. ... .
"Lumbini is situated at the foothills of the Himalayas in modern
Nepal. In the Buddha's time, Lumbini was a beautiful garden full of green and
shady Sal trees (Shorea). The garden and its tranquil environs were owned by
both the Shakyas and Kolias clans. King Suddhodana, father of Gautama Buddha was
of the Shakya dynasty belonging to the Kshatriya or the warrior caste. Maya Devi,
his mother, gave birth to the child on her way to her parent's home in Devadaha
while taking rest in Lumbini under a sal tree in the month of May in the year
642 B.C. The beauty of Lumbini is described in Pali and Sanskrit literature.
Maya Devi it is said was spellbound to see the natural grandeur of Lumbini.
While she was standing, she felt labor pains and catching hold of a drooping
branch of a Sal tree, the baby, the future Buddha, was born. ...
"In 249 BC, when the Emperor Ashoka visited Lumbini it was a
flourishing village. Ashoka constructed four stupas and a stone pillar with a
figure of a horse on top. The stone pillar bears an inscription which, in
English translation, runs as follows: "King Piyadasi (Ashoka), beloved of devas,
in the 20 year of the coronation, himself made a royal visit, Buddha Sakyamuni
having been born here, a stone railing was built and a stone pillar erected to
the Bhagavan having been born here, Lumbini village was taxed reduced and
entitled to the eight part (only)". ...
"In 1996, an archaeological dig unearthed a
"flawless stone" placed there by the Indian Emperor Ashoka
in 249 BC to mark the precise location of the Buddha's birth ... [ the following is from
http://vitalog.com/cgi-bin/profile/content.cgi?id=1605
downloaded probably in 2002] .
"... When Asoka visited Lumbini, the Buddha's birthplace, it was a
flourishing village. Asoka constructed four stupas and a stone pillar with a
figure of a horse on top. The stone pillar bears an inscription "King Piyadasi
(another name for Asoka), beloved of the gods, having being anointed 20 years,
came here himself and worshipped saying 'Here Buddha Sakyamuni was born'. ...
Buddha was born (ca. 624 BC) in Lumbini, now called Rummindei, not far from
Kapilavatthu, Nepal and died (ca. 544 BC) in Kusinara, now called Kushinagar,
Uttar Pradesh, India."
It would be safe to assume that the language the Buddha spoke would be the language
of the majority of the region. How did it sound like? Was the language
Indo-European or Tibeto-Burman? Of course, being born into the ruling
class it would be safe to assume that he knew the language of the ruling
class. Was the ruling class the Sanskrit-speakers or the Pali-speakers? These questions
have no definite answers, but since the Buddha himself realized the importance
of the local tongues (not Sanskrit -- see
Language Problem of Primitive Buddhism in
ban_sanskrit.htm ),
I would suggest that Buddha himself spoke the local Tibeto-Burman language.
And so, I would suggest that the
Myanmar-Pali pronunciations should have a precedence
over the pronunciation of English-Pali.
Contents of this page
The problem of the diacritical marks is the problem of the "English
alphabet" or more precisely the Latin alphabet. Since Myanmar and Indic
scripts are different from the Latin alphabet, there is no need to use
diacritical marks particularly in Myanmar. In fact Myanmar is an abugida not
an alphabet where every grapheme represents a syllable which can be pronounced
because of the presence of the inherent vowel approximately the English short
<a>.
Edited excerpt from Coping with Pali diacritical marks and fonts
A Guide to Learning the Pali Language by John Bullit,
http://www.accesstoinsight.org/pali/index.html
(downloaded probably in 2002)
http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/bullitt/learningpali.html
080726.
Bullit's lament in the first download: "Alas,
there is no standardized method for displaying Pali's accented
characters on computer screens."
Pali is a phonetic language with no written alphabet of its own. Students
of the language have therefore relied on their own native alphabets to read
and write Pali, ever since the 1st century BCE, when Sri
Lankan scribes first recorded the Tipitaka in the Sinhala alphabet. But the
Europeans who began to take an interest in South Asian languages in the 19th
century quickly discovered that their own roman alphabet was no match for
the wide range of phonemes (sounds) present in South Asian languages.
European scholars thus began representing the more problematic Pali phonemes
by augmenting the roman alphabet with a system of letter-pairs and
diacritics, including the macron (horizontal bar), dot-over, dot-under, and
tilde:
ā ī ū ṅ ñ ṭ
ṭh ḍ ḍh ṇ
ḷ ṃ -- Pali-Latin in Unicode
UKT: To overcome this problem, Myanmars who can read Myanmar script
should use Burmese-Myanmar script. For those who cannot read Myanmar, I suggest they
use Romabama (Burmese-extended Latin) which is a one-to-one transliteration
of Burmese-Myanmar. Romabama characters are presented within { }.
There are several problems with Pali scholars like John Bullit
who failed to realize that alphabets and abugidas
are different. Secondly, they failed to realize that Myanmar and Indic
scripts do not use capital letters. Thirdly, they should have used extended
Latin alphabet instead of limiting themselves to graphemes used for writing
English. I have remedied these failures in Romabama making it suitable for
writing e-mails.
Over the years, many different methods have been adopted in an attempt to
express Pali diacritics using the limited character sets available to personal
computers. Some of these strategies are:
• Ignore them altogether. This is the method generally used here at
Access to Insight (although I have used the palatal nasal ñ because it
is easily implemented using HTML). For example, the first precept
would be written thus:
panatipata veramani sikkha-padam samadiyami.
-- Burmese-Myanmar
{pa-Na-ti. pa-ta wé-ra-ma.Ni. thaik~hka pa.dän tha-ma-di.ya-mi} -- Romabama
• The Velthuis scheme: double the vowels, punctuate the consonants.
This scheme was originally developed in 1991 by Frans Velthuis for use with
his "devnag" Devanagari font, designed for the TEX
typesetting system. Pali and Sanskrit scholars have since adopted it as
a standard technique in Internet correspondence. In the Velthuis scheme
two basic rules are observed:
-- Long vowels (those usually typeset with a macron (bar) above them)
are doubled: aa ii uu
-- For consonants, the diacritic mark precedes the letter it affects. Thus,
the retroflex (cerebral) consonants (usually typeset with a dot underneath)
are: .r .t .th .d .dh .n .m .s .l. The guttural nasals (m or
n with a dot above) are represented by "m and "n .
The palatal nasal (n with a tilde) is ~n.
This scheme is precise, although it does take some getting used to:
paa.naatipaataa verama.nii sikkhaa-pada.m samaadiyaami.
-- Burmese-Myanmar
{pa-Na-ti. pa-ta wé-ra-ma.Ni. thaik~hka pa.dän tha-ma-di.ya-mi} --
Romabama
• Fake it using HTML. HTML has a few characters that take care of
some of the letters OK. For the long vowels you can use some sort of accent:
ä ï ü, à ì ù, â î û etc. The palatal n is
straightforward: ñ. Whatever method you adopt, be consistent. Example:
pâ.nâtipâtâ verama.nî sikkhâ-pada.m samâdiyâmi.
-- Burmese-Myanmar
{pa-Na-ti. pa-ta wé-ra-ma.Ni. thaik~hka pa.dän tha-ma-di.ya-mi} --
Romabama
• Use capital letters. Capitalized letters represent letters with an
accompanying diacritic. This method is simple, but it has ambiguities (e.g.,
how to distinguish between palatal and guttural n?). Example:
pANAtipAtA veramaNI sikkhA-padaM samAdiyAmi.
-- Burmese-Myanmar
{pa-Na-ti. pa-ta wé-ra-ma.Ni. thaik~hka pa.dän tha-ma-di.ya-mi} --
Romabama
UKT: As long as you are within one system, or within one book, the problem
of diacritical marks does not arise. However, if you are referencing or using
other books and sources, as I am doing now, you must be careful to note the
kind of system the author is using. For example, I am finding that PTS
Dictionary and Ashin Narada seems to be using different systems.
Contents of this page
a U0061
{a.} / ɑ U0251
{Au:} ( is not
{tha.ra.ric} which I would be writing as
)
ā U0101 / ɑ̄ U0251+U0304 (diacritical sign is known as macron)
The problem of pronunciation of vowel letter
{Au:} (and its corresponding vowel
{au:}) is
the problem of Western Pali scholars themselves who fail to differentiate [a]
and [ɑ]. This problem did spill over to the Indian Pali
scholars and their English speaking Myanmar counterparts. The problem can be
traced to the way English vowels are pronounced in different English dialects
such as RP (Received Pronunciation) and GA (General American). As an example,
listen to how a common English word such as <father> is pronounced. According
to DJPD16-199, the British pronunciation or RP is /fɑː.ðəʳ/. In
Myanmar, speakers of English pronounce it as /faː.ðəʳ/ which is similar
to way people in Ontario, Canada pronounce it. (This observation is mine and
that of my Canadian grandson Thit Tun who was born in Deep River, Ontario,
Canada.). Rewriting the IPA pronunciation in Myanmar script (which is a phonetic
alphabet belonging to the family to abugida scripts), <father> is approximately /
/
{hpau:tha:} in British English and /
/
{hpha:tha:} in English as pronounced in Canada and in Myanmar. (It is
noteworthy that Myanmar and Indic languages do not have labial-dental
fricatives [f] and [v].)
When you are going from website to website or from a printed book to the
next, you will run into the problem of finding the Pali-Myanmar {a} given in
two forms: a U0061 / ɑ U0251. Please remember that {a} has
only one pronunciation: IPA [a] and not IPA [ɑ]. Also remember that
Pali-Myanmar has only two types of vowels, the "short" and the "long", whereas
Burmese-Myanmar has three "tones" or pitch-registers: the extra-short, short
and long. For a discussion on pitch-registers see
Modal voice in
Human Voice hv4.htm.
Burmese-Myanmar:
{a.} -- the creaky tone is extra-short [ă]
{a} -- the medial [a] is of medium length
{a:} -- made up of two segments [a] and [ː] (or [aː]) is long and empathic
The so-called "tone #4" is a rime where a checked vowel is followed by a
"killed" (or an {a.thût}) consonant ,
e.g.
{ak} = [æk]
At this stage, my problem is to reconcile the pronunciations of "short" and
"long" vowels of Pali-Myanmar and the pitch-registers or "tones" of
Burmese-Myanmar. My quest is to pin down the "creaky" of Burmese for which I
would have to refer to the physical measurements of the Burmese vowels
themselves. It is unfortunate that so far I am not aware of any study of this
nature having been made (UKT 080727). The nearest I can find on creak and
modal is in The Phonetic Description of Voice quality by John Laver,
Reader in the Department of Linguistics, University of Edinburgh. Cambridge
Univ. Press, Cambridge, London, New York, New Rochelle, Melbourne, Sydney.
1980. First published 1980. ISBN 0 521 231 760. A photocopy of the book is in
my collection from which I have prepared the figure on the left. My conclusion
so far:
Pali-Myanmar:
short vowel falls between [ă] and [a]
long vowel falls between [a] and [aː]
(I am waiting for comments from my Burmese-Myanmar peers.)
Contents of this page
-- UKT
I have attempted to study Pali many times in my life as an
every-day language: not as a part of the Theravada
{hté-ra.wa-da.} Buddhism. The first time was in Myanmar the country of my
birth, and the Pali that I learned was the Myanmar Pali (Pali-Myanmar).
After coming to Canada, I tried to learn Pali a couple of times on the Internet.
Of course, it was the "English"-Pali (Pali-Latin): the lessons were from
An Elementary Pali Course, by Ven. Narada Thera.
I have prepared my lessons formerly in Tipitaka font. These files which you
are reading now are part of my first attempt to study Pali. I have now changed
the font to Arial Unicode MS. If the IPA character schwa [ ə ] appears on your
computer with almost the same shape as Burmese-Myanmar
{hka.}, then be
assured that most of the characters that is displayed on your computer screen
is correct. Even though you are using Arial Unicode MS, there is always a
chance that what you are seeing may not be the same as what I have intended.
This can be due to the operating system of your computer.
Contents of this page
From:
http://www.geocities.com/indoeurop/tree/indo/pali.html (2002)
The Buddhist Canon in Sri Lanka is written (see UKT note below) in Pali, so
the language is still used as a sacred one in Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand,
Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. But its homeland is India, and Pali originally was
one of western dialects which later acquired certain eastern characteristics.
Later together with Buddhism it spread within the South Eastern Asia, and a
lot of scientific, religious and literature works were written in it already
when it was forgotten in India. There are in fact four kinds of Pali: the
Canon Pali, the literature Pali, the commentary Pali and the modern Pali; the
last one has got a significant number of local borrowings and peculiarities
and is no longer classical.
UKT note: It is statements like the above that usually lead non-linguists
astray. Pali is a spoken language, written in the script of the land where
it is used: for example in Myanmar, it is written in Myanmar script.
Strictly speaking Myanmar and Indic scripts are
abugidas (alpha-syllabaries) and not alphabets.
The usual statement that Pali "alphabet"
consists of forty-one letters -- 8 vowels (Sara)
{tha.ra.} , and 33 consonants (Vyañjana)
{byiñ~za.na.} (Bur-Myan
{byæÑ:}) is very troublesome for me, because Pali is a spoken language, and
vowels and consonants primarily refer to the sounds rather than to the way
the sounds are graphically represented.
Phonetics:
Pali phonetics is rather simple: 5 simple vowels, no diphthongs and
sonant vowels, aspirated and non-aspirated consonants.
Pali phonetic laws prohibit the usage of a great number of
fricative consonants together, all words end in a vowel.
UKT: By "phonetic laws", the author of
www.geocities.com seems to be referring to
phonotactics. See also
obstruents and sonorants
(sonority scale). Since Pali spoken in Sri Lanka is bound to be
somewhat restricted by the phonotactics and the sonority scale
of the native language of the land, we should expect it to be slightly
different from Pali-Myanmar.
Nominal Morphology:
In morphology the number of vowel interchanges decreased in comparison with Sanskrit;
there is a trend of unification of types of noun declension and verb
conjugation, and the number of cases is six at maximum.
Verbal Morphology:
The verb has only three tenses and two aspects: ancient Indic languages Vedic
and Sanskrit used much more of them. The system of syntax is well developed
and uses many auxiliary parts of speech in analytical constructions.
Lexicon:
Pali is interesting for its vocabulary which is totally unnatural and
is created only in order to reflect the ideas of the religion.
UKT: I am skeptical of suggestions that "[Pali] is totally unnatural and is
created only in order to reflect the ideas of the religion." See
The Language Problem of Primitive Buddhism
by Chi Hisen-lin, Journal of the Burma Research Society, XLIII, i, June 1960.
Close contacts:
Languages of the Southeast Asia contributed much to the "modern"
variety of Pali. Of the Indic languages, Pali is rather similar to Sanskrit.
For more information, see:
•
Indo-European Chronology (Indic)
•
The Routes of Indo-Aryan Migrations (essay including the glossary)
• Links
Contents of this page
From: The Aryans and Ancient Indian History, by Subhash Kak, Professor at
Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge
http://swetamishraa.sulekha.com/blog/post/2008/03/the-aryans-and-ancient-indian-history.htm
080727
The concept of invading hordes of Aryans conquering northern
India around 1500 BC arose in the nineteenth century for a variety of reasons.
Linguists had established that the north Indian, Iranian, and most European
languages were structurally related and belonged to the same family, which was
given the name Indo-European.
UKT: Since, the three ancient river-civilizations (Nile in Egypt,
Euphrates-Tigris in Mesopotamia, and Sarasvasti-Indus in Indian-subcontinent)
were linked by sea-routes across the Indian Ocean with very predictable
half-yearly trade winds, we can expect the languages of the areas to share
many common traits. We can even imagine them to belong to the same
language family.
A homeland was postulated and it was assumed that the residents of this
homeland spoke a common language, called "proto-Indo-European'' (PIE), which
was the ancestor to the historically known ancient languages such as
Sanskrit, Avestan, Greek, Latin, and so on. Based primarily on linguistic
considerations, several theories were proposed according to which this
homeland was likely to have been in southeastern Europe or Central Asia. By
assigning an arbitrary period of 200 years to each of the several layers of
the pre-Buddhist Vedic literature, the period of around 1500 BC was arrived at
for the entry of the Aryans into India.
This alleged Aryan invasion was then tied up with the mention of the horse in
the Vedic literature by asserting that the invading Aryans brought horses and
chariots with them. This hypothesis was considered proven by claiming that the
domestication of the horse took place not too much before 1500 BC. It was
assumed that the horse provided military advantage to the Aryans, which made
it possible for them to conquer the indigenous inhabitants of India.
Early objections
Scholars soon pointed out many problems with this theory. First, the earliest
Indian literature has no memory of any such entry from outside and its focus
is squarely the region of the seven rivers, "Sapta Sindhu'', with its centre
in the Sarasvati valleys and covering a great part of north and northwest
India ranging from Indus to Ganga to Sarayu. Second, Indian traditional king
lists go back into fourth millennium BC and earlier; also, the more reliable
lists of teachers in the Vedic books cannot be fitted into the Aryan invasion
chronology.
UKT: "Sapta Sindhu" means the "seven rivers": from "Sapta" or 'seven'
{that~ta.} and "Sindhu"
{thain~Du.} or river. See UHS-PaliDict-1036 for
{thain~Du.}.
Third, it was contended that the beginnings of the vast Vedic literature
needed a greater time horizon easily reaching back at least into the third
millennium BC.
Fourth, astronomical references in the Vedic literature refer to events as
early as the fourth millennium BC. The Puranas [
{pu.ra-Na.} the 18 volumes of past events -- UHS-PaliDict-0684] remember migrations out of
India; such migrations were invoked to explain the reference to Vedic gods in
treaties between kings and to other Indic names in West Asian texts and
inscriptions in the second millennium BC; but the supporters of the Aryan
invasion theory saw these West Asian Indic references as traces of the
migratory path of the Aryans into India.
Fifth, The Vedic literature nowhere mentions riding in battle and the horse
was rare in Vedic times and the word "ashva'' for horse was often used
figuratively for speed.
UKT: " 'ashva' for horse" is
{ath~tha.}. UHS-PaliDict-0150 gives 3 meanings: "shoulder",
"angle, corner", and "horse".
Sixth, there was no plausible process explaining how
incursions by nomads could have overwhelmed the original languages in one of
the most densely populated regions of the ancient world.
Seventh, the Vedic literature spoke of the Aryans as living in a complex
society with an important urban element; there is mention of cities,
ocean-going ships, numerous professions, which is contradictory to the image
of barbaric invaders from the north.
Although the assumptions at the basis of the Aryan invasion theory were
arbitrary and there was little supporting evidence, the reason this theory
became popular was that it fulfilled several unstated needs of the historians
at the time. It reinforced the racial attitudes popular in the nineteenth
century so that the highly regarded Vedas could be assigned to a time before
the Aryans in India mixed with the indigenous races. The conquest of India by
the British was taken to be similar to the supposed earlier conquest by the
Aryans and so this theory played an important imperialistic function. Slowly,
as the Aryan invasion date became the anchor that was used to fix other
ancient events in the histories of the Indian, Iranian, and European peoples,
scholars became ever more reluctant to question the assumptions on which it
was based.
New discoveries and insights
Archaeological discoveries made in the Indian sub-continent in the past
century have slowly accumulated evidence which has
led to a discrediting of the Aryan invasion model. These discoveries have been
reinforced by new insights from history of science, astronomy, and literary
analysis. The main points of the evidence are highlighted below:
• It has been found that the Sapta Sindhu region -- precisely the same region
which is the heartland of the Vedic texts-- is associated with a cultural
tradition that has been traced back to at least 8000 BC without any break. It
appears that the Sarasvati region was the centre of this cultural tradition
and this is what the Vedic texts also indicate. The term 'Aryan' in Indian
literature has no racial or linguistic connotations.
• According to the work of Kenneth Kennedy of Cornell University there is no
evidence of demographic discontinuity in archaeological remains during the
period 4500 to 800 BC. In other words, there was no
significant influx of people into India during this period.
• B.B. Lal of the Archaeological Survey of India discovered fire altars in his
excavations at the third-millennium site of Kalibangan. It appears now that
fire altars were in use at other Harappan sites as well. Fire altars are an
essential part of the Vedic ritual.
• Geologists have determined that the Sarasvati river dried up around 1900 BC.
Since Sarasvati is the greatest river of the Rigvedic hymns, one conclusion
that can be drawn is that the Rigveda was composed prior to 1900 BC.
• Study of pottery styles and cultural artifacts has led archaeologists such
as Jim Shaffer of Case Western Reserve University to conclude that the Indus-Sarasvati
culture exhibits a continuity that can be traced back to at least 8000 BC. Shaffer summarizes:
"The shift by Harappans [after the drying up of the Sarasvati river around
1900 BC] is the only archaeologically documented west-to-east movement of
human populations in South Asia before the first half of the first millennium
BC.'' In other words, there has been no Aryan invasion.
• A. Seidenberg of University of California at Berkeley reviewed the geometry
of the fire altars of India as summarized in early Vedic texts such as the
Shatapatha Brahmana and compared it to the early geometry of Greece and
Mesopotamia. In a series of papers, he was able to establish that this Vedic
geometry should be dated prior to
1700 BC.
• It has now been discovered that altar constructions were used to represent
astronomical knowledge. Furthermore, an astronomical code has been found in
the organization of the Vedic books. This code
establishes that the Vedic people had a tradition of observational astronomy
which means that the many astronomical references in the Vedic texts that
point to events as early as 3000 or 4000 BC can no longer be ignored.
• Recent computer analysis of the texts from India have shown that the Brahmi
script of the times of the Mauryan king Ashoka is derived from the earlier
third millennium script of the Indus-Sarasvati age. This again is strong
evidence of cultural
continuity.
• The archaeological record shows that the Indus-Sarasvati area was different
from other ancient civilizations in many cultural features. For example, in
contrast to ancient Egypt or Mesopotamia, it shows very little monumental
architecture; it appears that the political organization and its relationship
to other elites in the society was unique. This is paralleled by the unique
character of the Vedic literary tradition with its emphasis on knowledge and
the nature of the self.
• Remains of the horse have been discovered in the Harappan ruins. A clay
model of a horse was found in Mohenjo Daro. New findings from Ukraine show
evidence of horse riding as early as 4000 BC. The notion
that the Aryans burst into history as horse riding nomads sometime after 2000
BC stands totally rejected.
Taken together, the cumulative evidence completely belies the Aryan invasion
theory. If an influx of people into India took place it should be earlier than
4500 BC if one considers the demographic evidence, and perhaps before 8000 BC
if one considers other related evidence. On the other hand, it is equally
plausible that the Sapta Sindhu region was the original homeland of the Aryans
from where they migrated to Iran and Europe, as remembered in Puranic legends.
Linguistic issues
Recently, linguists have called into question the very assumptions that are at
the basis of the genealogical model of the Indo-European family of languages.
It has been suggested that the ancient world had very many language families
and that population increase and greater contacts and trade with the emergence
of agriculture coupled with large-scale political integration led to
extinction of languages and also to a transfer of languages across
ethnic groups. In such a complex evolutionary process it is meaningless to pin
a specific language on any racial type.
In the Indian linguistic area itself it has been found that there exist deep
structural relationships between the north Indian and the Dravidian languages.
It is likely that the Vedic period represents an age much after the contact
between these two linguistic families had begun; in other words, the early
Vedic period might represent a synthesis between the north Indian and the
Dravidian cultural histories.
Chronology of the Vedic literature
The collapse of the Aryan invasion theory, and the assumptions upon which it
was based, opens many other questions related to the chronology of the Vedic
literature. Certain key dates in Indian literature were decided by assuming
the flow of ideas from Greece to India. For example, the Sutra literature was
dated to after 300 BC primarily because it was assumed that the geometry of
the Shulba Sutras came after Greek geometry. Now that Seidenberg has shown
that essentially the same geometry was present in the earlier Brahmanas, which
definitely predate Greek geometry, the question of the chronology of the Sutra
literature becomes important. Using astronomical references it appears
that the Vedic Samhitas should be dated to the third millennium BC, the
Brahmanas to the second millennium BC, with the Upanishads and the Sutras
coming somewhat later. But further research is needed here.
An interesting question that arises is: why did the Aryan invasion theory hold
sway for so long? The answer is complex and related to the use of a flawed
method. The invasions were considered verified by a circular logic. The dates
within the invasion theory were used to characterize the nature of the
evolution of Vedic Sanskrit, and this was in turn related to observed
peculiarities of other ancient Indo-European languages such as Hittite,
Avestan, Armenian, Greek, Latin, and so on. Migrations at different times from
the supposed homeland were then invoked to explain these peculiarities. This is
circular logic, and consequently no amount of linguistic evidence can lead to
the falsification of the model.
The debunking of the Aryan invasion theory raises many questions about the
earliest periods of the Indo-European linguistic groups and the connections
between their cultures.
by Subhash Kak ,Professor at Louisiana State University,Baton Rouge ,
www.ee.lsu.edu/kak
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UKT: The classification of sounds into obstruents and sonorants is very
confusing for a person who is used to the akshara classification (sounds as well
as scripts) of {wag}-nasal-{a.wag} classification.
The following definitions are from AHTD.
obstruent n. 2. Linguistics A sound, such as a
stop, a fricative, or an affricate, that is produced with complete blockage or
at least partial constriction of the airflow through the nose or mouth. [Latin
obstruēns obstruent-, present participle of obstruere to obstruct; See
obstruct ] -- AHTD
sonorant n. Linguistics 1. A voiced consonant regarded
as a syllabic sound, as the last sound in the word sudden. [sonor(ous)
-ant ] -- AHTD
The following are from other sources.
obstruents
UKT: We may take the aksharas of the r1, r3, r4 and r5 rows of the akshara
matrix, the {wag}-consonants (exclusive of the nasals), are obstruents.
However, the r2 consonants {sa. hsa. za. Za.} are problematical. The case of
{sa.} is illuminating. It has two pronunciations: in the coda it is a stop
[c], whereas in the onset it is a fricative [s]. e.g.
{thic~sa.}. English <cc> is also of this type: <success> /sək'ses/
(transcription from DJPD16-515). It should be noted that since the POAs of [k]
and [c] are close, I have suggested that the transcription could have been /səc'ses/
which calls for a palatal <c> in English. When I posted this possibility on a
forum, almost all responses were that English does not have a palatal <c>,
which is true if <c> has been an onset. I insisted that coda <c> could very
well be [c], the case being similar to the case of {sa.}.
From: Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obstruent download 070910
In phonetics, articulation may be divided into two large classes, obstruents
and sonorants. An obstruent is a consonant sound formed by obstructing
outward airflow, causing increased air pressure in the vocal tract.
Obstruents
are those articulations in which there is a total closure
or a stricture causing friction, both groups being associated with a noise
component; in this class there is a distinctive opposition between voiceless and
voiced types.
Obstruents are subdivided into stops (UKT: plosives), fricatives, and
affricates. Obstruents are prototypically voiceless, though voiced obstruents
are common. This contrasts with sonorants, which are rarely voiceless.
Go back obst-sono-note-b
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From Wikipedia,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonotactics 071230
Phonotactics
(in Greek phone = voice and tactic = course)
is a branch of phonology that deals with restrictions in a language on
the permissible combinations of phonemes. Phonotactics defines permissible
syllable structure, consonant clusters, and vowel sequences by means of
phonotactical constraints.
Phonotactic constraints are language specific.
For example, in Japanese, consonant clusters like /st/ are not allowed,
although they are in English. Similarly, the sounds /kn/ and /ɡn/ [obviously the
{nga.} [ŋ] sound] are not permitted at the beginning of a word in Modern English
but are in German and Dutch.
UKT: In English both /sw/ and /st/ are allowed, whereas in Burmese, though
/sw/ is allowed /st/ is not.
This shows that English /t/ is more sonorous than Burmese /t/. Whatever the
case may be, in transliterating English to Burmese, we have to accept the
"killed" {sa.},
{s} in the onset, e.g. <stat>
{s~tat} or
{stat}.
I am waiting for comments from my peers.
Syllables have the following internal segmental structure:
• Onset (optional)
• Rime (obligatory, comprises Nucleus and Coda):
- Nucleus (obligatory)
- Coda (optional)
Both onset and coda may be empty, forming a vowel-only syllable, or
alternatively, the nucleus can be occupied by a syllabic consonant.
English Phonotactics:
The English syllable (and word) twelfths
/twɛlfθs/ is divided into the onset /tw/, the nucleus /ɛ/,
and the coda /lfθs/, and it can thus be described as CCVCCCC
(C = consonant, V = vowel). On this basis it is possible to form rules
for which representations of phoneme classes may fill the cluster.
For instance, English allows at most three consonants in
an onset, but among native words under standard accents, phonemes in a
three-consonantal onset are limited to the following scheme:
/s/ + pulmonic + approximant:
• /s/ + /m/ + /j/
• /s/ + /t/ + /j ɹ/
• /s/ + /p/ + /j ɹ l/
• /s/ + /k/ + /j ɹ l w/
This constraint can be observed in the pronunciation of the word <blue> :
originally, the vowel of blue was identical to the vowel of cue,
approximately [iw]. In most dialects of English, [iw] shifted to [juː].
Theoretically, this would produce ** [bljuː]. The cluster [blj], however,
infringes the constraint for three-consonantal onsets in English. Therefore, the
pronunciation has been reduced to [bluː] by elision of the [j].
Other languages don't share the same constraint: compare Spanish
pliegue [ˈpljeɣe] or French pluie [plɥi].
Sonority hierarchy: In general, the rules of phonotactics operate
around the sonority hierarchy, stipulating that the nucleus has maximal
sonority and that sonority decreases as you move away from the nucleus.
The voiceless alveolar fricative [s] is lower on the sonority hierarchy than the
alveolar lateral approximant [l], so the combination /sl/ is permitted in onsets
and /ls/ is permitted in codas, but /ls/ is not allowed in onsets and /sl/ is
not allowed in codas. Hence <slips> /slɪps/ and <pulse>
/pʌls/ are possible English words while *lsips and *pusl
are not. There are of course exceptions to this rule, but in general it holds
for the phonotactics of most languages.
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phonotactics-note-b
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