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The post in question is: “Pāli Dictionaries – Are They Reliable?”
In that post, in #1, it says: “Pāli does not have its own alphabet. It was a spoken language, and the Pāli Canon (Tipitaka) was first written using Sinhala alphabet around 5 BCE (two thousand years ago); see, “Historical Background“.”
So, the question appears to be: “Did the Sinhala alphabet exist 2000 years ago in the same form as today?”. It is an important question, and one can get some insights by looking into this issue.
The short answer is that the Sinhala alphabet very likely underwent CHANGES during those 2000 years.
The answer is in the post, “Preservation of the Buddha Dhamma“.
It would be better to read that whole post, but the answer to this question is under #9:“9. Another important point is that even up to the 20th century, the whole Tipitaka was written on specially prepared ola (palm) leaves. They deteriorate over 100 years or so and needed to be re-written. Even though that was a very labor-intensive process (there are about 60 large volumes in the modern printed version of the Tipitaka), it served another important purpose.
- Sinhala language (both spoken and written) changed over the past 2000 years. The need to re-write it every 100 or so years made sure that the changes in Sinhala script was taken into account; of course Pāli language has not changed at all”.
Therefore, any changes to words/alphabet would have been taken care of due to this process.
I need to revise the post “Pāli Dictionaries – Are They Reliable?” to make this point point clear.
Thanks for bringing it up.
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