Chapter PALAVERAM to PALI of P by The Hobson Jobson Dictionary

Bon Gaultier, Eastern Serenade.]

1862.—“Bala posh, or Palang posh, quilt or coverlet, 300 to 1000 rupees.”—Punjab Trade Report, App. p. xxxviii.

1880.—“…and third, the celebrated palampores, or ‘bed-covers,’ of Masulipatam, Fatehgarh, Shikarpur, Hazara, and other places, which in point of art decoration are simply incomparable.”—Birdwood, The Industrial Arts of India, 260.

PALI, s. The name of the sacred language of the Southern Buddhists, in fact, according to their apparently well-founded tradition Magadhi, the dialect of what we now call South Bahar, in which Sakya Muni discoursed. It is one of the Prakrits (see PRACRIT) or Aryan vernaculars of India, and has probably been a dead language for nearly 2000 years. Pali in Skt. means ‘a line, row, series’; and by the Buddhists is used for the series of their Sacred Texts. Pali-bhasha is then ‘the language of the Sacred Texts,’ i.e. Magadhi; and this is called elliptically by the Singhalese Pali, which we have adopted in like use. It has been carried, as the sacred language, to all the Indo-Chinese countries which have derived their religion from India through Ceylon. Pali is “a sort of Tuscan among the Prakrits” from its inherent grace and strength (Childers). But the analogy to Tuscan is closer still in the parallelism of the modification of Sanskrit words, used in Pali, to that of Latin words used in Italian.

Robert Knox does not apparently know by that name the Pali language in Ceylon. He only speaks of the Books of Religion as “being in an eloquent style which the Vulgar people do not understand” (p.75); and in another passage says: “They have a language something differing from the vulgar tongue (like Latin to us) which their books are writ in” (p. 109).

1689.—“Les uns font valoir le style de leur Alcoran, les autres de leur Báli.”—Lettres Edif. xxv. 61.

1690.—“…this Doubt proceeds from the Siameses understanding two Languages, viz., the Vulgar, which is a simple Tongue, consisting almost wholly of Monosyllables, without Conjugation or Declension; and another Language, which I have already spoken of, which to them is a dead Tongue, known only by the Learned, which is called the Balie Tongue, and which is enricht with the inflexions of words, like the Languages we have in Europe. The terms of Religion and Justice, the names of Offices, and all the Ornaments of the Vulgar Tongue are borrow’d from the Balie.”—De la Loubère’s Siam, E.T. 1693, p. 9.

1795.—“Of the ancient Pállis, whose language constitutes at the present day the sacred text of Ava, Pegue, and Siam, as well as of several other countries eastward of the Ganges: and of their migration from India to the banks of the Cali, the Nile of Ethiopia, we have but very imperfect information.¹…It has been the opinion of some of the most enlightened writers on the languages of the East, that the Pali, the sacred language of the priests of Boodh, is nearly allied to the Shanscrit of the Bramins: and there certainly is much of that holy idiom engrafted on the vulgar language of Ava, by the introduction of the Hindoo religion.”—Symes, 337–8.

1818.—“The Talapoins…do apply themselves in some degree to study, since according to their rules they are obliged to learn the Sadá, which is the grammar of the Palì language or Magatà, to read the Vini, the Padimot…and the sermons of Godama.…All these books are written in the Pali tongue, but the text is accompanied by a Burmese translation. They were all brought into the kingdom by a certain Brahmin from the island of Ceylon.”—Sangermano’s Burmese Empire, p. 141.

[1822.—“…the sacred books of the Buddhists are composed in the Balli tongue.…”—Wallace, Fifteen Years in India, 187.]

1837.—“Buddhists are impressed with the conviction that their sacred and classical language, the Mágadhi or Páli, is of greater antiquity than the Sanscrit; and that it had attained also a higher state of refinement than its rival tongue had acquired. In support of this belief they adduce various arguments, which, in their judgment, are quite conclusive. They observe that the very word Páli signifies original, text, regularity; and there is scarcely a Buddhist scholar in Ceylon, who, in the discussion of this question, will not quote, with an air of triumph, their favourite verse,—

Sá Mágadhi; múla bhásá (&c.).

‘There is a language which is the root;…men and bráhmans at the commencement of the creation, who never before heard nor uttered a human accent, and even the Supreme Buddhos, spoke it: it is Mágadhi.’

“This verse is a quotation from Kachcháyanó’s grammar, the oldest referred to in the Páli literature of Ceylon.…Let me…at once avow, that, exclusive of all philological considerations, I am inclined, on primã facie evidence—external as well as internal—to entertain an opinion adverse to the claims of the Buddhists on this particular point.”—George Turnour, Introd. to Maháwanso, p. xxii.

1874.—“The spoken language of Italy was to be found in a number of provincial dialects, each with its own characteristics, the Piedmontese harsh, the Neapolitan nasal, the Tuscan soft and flowing. These dialects had been rising in importance as Latin declined; the