Buddhaghosa’s opening verses to his Dīghanikāya commentary with some verses of the Old Tamil Buddhist epic Maṇimēkalai, both written in South India around the 5th to 6th centuries CE. The Tamil is parsed and translated and comparisons are made regarding:
(a) strings of absolutives/participles with a single main verb at the end;
(b) participial constructions replacing relative-correlative constructions;
(c) constructions of the type, paṭhamajjhānam upasampajja viharati (Geiger 1943/1994, §174.5), which apparently is common to all Indic languages (p. 202);
(d)a dative-like genitive; and
(e) absolutives used as postpositions.
I observe the increased use of absolutives as a salient difference in style between canonical Pali and the story-telling of the Dhammapada commentary as well as the Jātakas. I still have a mental caveat, however, that the languages may have been converging, and wonder if it might also be true to speak of a “Palicisation” of Old Tamil, especially Buddhist Old Tamil.
Levman also discusses the -bb- geminate being unique to Pali proves that it is archaic. He suggests that -b- and -v- were allophonic and it was merely a scribal convention that only -v- for -bb- is used in Aśokan inscriptions. I too have considered this possibility and also wondered if they are different representations of , the voiced bilabial fricative, which sounds halfway between b and v and may have been allophonic, with v for non-native Indo-Aryan speakers in instances like vy-.
(1) -bbis not found in Epigraphic Prakrit/Epigraphic Pali either; (2) the Sri Lankan manuscript tradition never alternates with -vv- although it interchanges vy- and by- in initial position; (3) I believe no manuscript tradition has, for example, *bā, *baṇṇa, *bibatta or *vandhati, *vāhu, *vīja, and there are many more examples where -b- and -v- are not interchangeable. I therefore think they were not allophonic, but were on occasions interchanged.
- Journal of the
Pali Facts, Fictions and Factions Stefan Karpik
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