Tagged: Middle Indo-Aryan
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Levman - The language of early Buddhism (2016)
1The earliest recoverable language of Buddhism was not a specific regional dialect but a Middle Indo-Aryan (MIA) *koine*, an inter-dialectal common language created through simplification and the leveling of distinct features to facilitate communication. Evidence for this underlying language is found by comparing parallel Buddhist transmissions in Pāli, Gāndhārī, and other Prakrits, where translation errors and ambiguities (hyperforms) point to a shared, phonologically reduced source. Key characteristics of this *koine* include the weakening or elimination of intervocalic stops, the reduction of aspirated stops to simple aspirates, the assimilation of consonant clusters, and the merging of sibilants. The formation of this simplified language was driven not only by the need to harmonize different MIA dialects but was also significantly catalyzed by contact with other languages in the ancient Indian "Sprachbund," such as Dravidian, Munda, and Tocharian, whose speakers lacked features like phonemic voicing or aspirated stops, thereby accelerating the development of a more universally intelligible form of MIA.
Norman - The origin of Pāli and its position among the Indo-European languages (1988)
2Pāli is a Middle Indo-Aryan language that originated not as a specific regional tongue but as a composite literary dialect used for the Buddhist canon. Descending from the Indo-European language family, it developed from the various Prakrits spoken in North India following the migration of Indo-Aryan peoples and their interaction with indigenous Dravidian and Munda populations. The Buddha and his followers preached in these local vernaculars, and Pāli emerged from the subsequent effort to standardize these diverse teachings into a single language for the Theravādin tradition. While primarily based on a Western Prakrit, Pāli retains features from other dialects, such as Māgadhī, reflecting its mixed origins and the process of translation and compilation. The language was largely fixed when the canon was committed to writing in the first century B.C., after which it underwent further editorial standardization, including significant Sanskritization and, in later periods, minor influences from Sinhalese and the work of medieval Pāli grammarians.