Where does the Pali language come from? Who spoke it? It is said that the Buddha spoke Magadhi. He lived in India, thus Pali must come from there, right?
Is Sanskrit close to Pali or is Sinhala closer to Pali?<br />
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I am just reading a text about Pali on Wikipedia:
Pali and Sanskrit are very closely related and the common characteristics of Pali and Sanskrit were always easily recognized by those in India who were familiar with both. A large part of Pali and Sanskrit word-stems are identical in form, differing only in details of inflection.
Technical terms from Sanskrit were converted into Pali by a set of conventional phonological transformations. These transformations mimicked a subset of the phonological developments that had occurred in Proto-Pali. Because of the prevalence of these transformations, it is not always possible to tell whether a given Pali word is a part of the old Prakrit lexicon, or a transformed borrowing from Sanskrit. The existence of a Sanskrit word regularly corresponding to a Pali word is not always secure evidence of the Pali etymology, since, in some cases, artificial Sanskrit words were created by back-formation from Prakrit words.
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Wiki on Magadha Empire
…Beginning in the Theravada commentaries, the Pali language has been identified with Magahi, the language of the kingdom of Magadha, and this was taken to also be the language that the Buddha used during his life. In the 19th century, the British Orientalist Robert Caesar Childers argued that the true or geographical name of the Pali language was Magadhi Prakrit, and that because pāḷi means “line, row, series”, the early Buddhists extended the meaning of the term to mean “a series of books”, so pāḷibhāsā means “language of the texts”.<sup id=”cite_ref-29″ class=”reference”>[29]</sup> Nonetheless, Pali does retain some eastern features that have been referred to as Māgadhisms.<sup id=”cite_ref-Gethin2008_30-0″ class=”reference”>[30]</sup>