Pali Alphabet & using the PED Dictionary

What is the Pali Alphabet? How is it arranged? How do you use a Pali dictionary?
Well, the first thing to note is that Pāli is written in many different scripts.

As the buddhist canon travelled, local people used either Indian scripts or switched to their own local scripts. For more on local scripts see here.
But for now we are just interested in the Romanized Pali alphabet. This runs Vowels first, then consonants. as follows:

a, ā, i, ī, u, ū, e, o
(ṃ*) k, kh, g, gh, (ṅ)
c, ch, j, jh, ñ
ṭ, ṭh, ḍ, (ḍh), (ṇ)
t, th, d, dh, n
p, ph, b, bh, m
y, r, l, (ḷ), (ḷh), v, s, h

[Note: the letters in brackets have no entries in the dictionary.]

Pali is a phonetic language so each entry above represents a single sound. Every letter always has the same pronunciation regardless of its context, so no letter has more than one pronunciation, and no sounds are represented by more than one letter. As there are more sounds in Pāli than letters in the roman alphabet, to make distinctions, special symbols or glyphs, called diacritics, are added to the basic letters. [More on how to enter diacritic marks.]

It is traditional to arrange the letters by where the sounds are made in the mouth, beginning at the back with the guttarals and moving forward:

	Consonants								Vowels
	Mutes
	Surd		Sonants
	Unaspirate	Aspirate	Unaspirate	Aspirate	Nasals	Semi-vowels Liquids	Spirant	Sibilant
gutterals	k	kh	g	gh	ṅ		h		a, ā	e	o
palatals	c	ch	j	jh	ñ	y			i, ī
linguals	ṭ	ṭh	ḍ	ḍh	ṇ	r, ḷ
dentals	t	th	d	dh	n	l		s (surd)
labials	p	ph	b	bh	m	v			u, ū
			ṃ (niggahīta) - sonant

Note, the Aspirate sounds are denoted by a letter combination (e.g. Kh). This is actually one sound and therefore one letter. Also the linguals (also called retroflex) are all denotated by a dot below the letter. For more on these terms and a guide to pronunciation see this video:

The Pali Alphabet & Pronunciation Guide | Learn Pāli Basics

A tutorial on how to pronounce the Pali alphabet [in Roman script], its phonetics, and why the niggahīta turns into a nasal - featuring how Pali characters are pronounced - with animations of where...

or visit this  YouTube playlist of Pali pronunciation.
I don't find pronuciation tables very useful, but for a guide see Duroseille.

Using the Pali Text Society's 'Pali-English Dictionary'

This is still the standard Dictionary for Pali scholars worlswide. The PED contains most Pali words to be found in the Tipitaka, with English definitions and Sanskrit roots.

The Pali Text Society's Pali-English Dictionary' PED (online)

It can be quite a challenge to use the PED dictionary for several reasons that I go into below.

In order to aid the student I've created a the PED  lookup tool for a quick way of converting Unicode Pali to PED format. This little tool corrects most of the issues listed below and creates link to the PED entry too. Enjoy!

Ok, one feature of Pali dictionaries, I find irritating, is that they follow the order of the Pali alphabet, which differs from the order of the English alphabet, and makes looking up words counter-intuitive. Of course, digital searches mean that one no longer has to page through a dictionary by hand anymore. But it's important to be aware of certain points when using the PED Pali dictionary.

The PED list nouns in their stem form and verbs in the 3rd person singular. Which means dictionary lookup is fine if you know the stem of the Pali stem in which you are interested. If you don’t, it's a bit more complicated. In this case, first one must attempt to remove any inflectional suffixes and then deduce the original stem.

For most Pali words, the stem itself doesn’t alter in form much during the inflection process; so if you strip off the last 1 or 2 letters from the end of nouns, what remains will be close to the stem form - close enough to find it in the dictionary. For verbs you are looking for the -ti form. Note also, prefixes usually have to be removed from the beginning of the stems too! So if you can't find the word you're looking for, check to see if it is possibly prefixed.

Noun:

rūpa, 'form'
	Singular	Plural
Nom	rūpaṃ	rūpāni rūpā
Acc	rūpaṃ	rūpāni rūpe
Ins	rūpena	rūpehi rūpebhi
Abl	rupā rūpasmā rūpamhā rūpato	rūpehi rūpebhi
Gen	rūpassa	rūpānaṃ
Dat	rūpassa rūpāya	rūpānaṃ
Loc	rūpe rūpasmiṃ rūpamhi	rūpesu
Voc	rūpa	rūpāni rūpā

Verb:

gaccha 'to go'
	Indic.	Aorist	Future.
3rd per. Sgl.	gacchati	gacchi	gacchissati
2nd per. Sgl.	gacchasi	gaccho	gacchissasi
1st per. Sgl.	gacchāmi	gacchiṃ	gacchissāmi
3rd per. Pl.	gacchanti	gacchiṃsu	gacchissanti
2nd per. Pl.	gacchatha	gacchittha	gacchissatha
1st per. Pl.	gacchāma	gacchimha	gacchissāma

As a very over-simplied guide:

• Decide whether it's a verb of a noun
• For Verbs:
   If not ending -ti, remove the last few letters to a vowel and add -ti
• For nouns:
   remove the last few letters to a consonant and add -a [-i, -u less frequently]
• If no luck, Remove any prefixes.

Note:
The major exceptions to the above are pronouns whose form (spelling) alter significantly during inflection and if you don’t know these by heart then one has to fall back on the standard lookup tables. If you suspect you have a pronoun, see the post on Pali pronouns for a searchable spreadsheet.

The ṃ niggahīta and the PED

One final problem with dictionaries is the 'niggahīta' which can be transliterated as η, ṁ or ṃ in the texts. The modern form is ṃ. However, the PED uses the old η form and only lists what are called 'true niggahīta' (also sometimes called true anusvāra). No word begins with a niggahīta but they can occur mid-word. This results in the following entries:

-ηy-, -ηr-, -ηh-, -ηv-, -ηs-

In the dictionary order, they are treated as being the 1st consonant (coming before k) but phonetically they are not a separate sound.

Also the PED consistently uses 'n' instead of 'ṅ'...

To summarise, the basic pattern followed by dictionaries:

sa;
saṃ;
saṃy-; saṃr-; saṃh-; saṃv-; saṃs-; saṃ˙-;
sak-; sakh-; sag-; sagh-; saṅ- (including: saṅk-, saṅkh-, saṅg-, saṅgh-);
sac-; sach-; saj-; sajh-; sañ- (including: sañc-, sañch-, sañj-, sañjh-);
saṭ-; saṭh-; saḍ-; saḍh-; saṇ- (including: saṇṭ-, saṇṭ˙-, saṇḍ-, saṇḍ˙-);
sat-; sath-; sad-; sadh-; san- (including: sant-, santh-, sand-, sandh-);
sap-; saph-; sab-; sabh-; sam- (including: samp-, samph-, samb-, sambh-); say-; sar-; sal-; sav-; sas-; sah-.

What is a false niggahīta

What have become termed 'false niggahīta' (also sometimes called false anusvāra) are niggahīta which appear before any letter other than: -ηy-, -ηr-, -ηh-, -ηv-, -ηs-. So if you come across a Pali word which has a niggahīta in the middle of it, other than those listed above, you have to transform that niggahīta into a nasal in order to find the word in the dictionary as follows:

niggahīta followed by:		PED entry
η, ṁ or ṃ	k, kh, g, gh or ṅ	n (ṅ)
η, ṁ or ṃ	c, ch, j, jh or ñ	ñ
η, ṁ or ṃ	ṭ, ṭh, ḍ, ḍh or ṇ	ṇ
η, ṁ or ṃ	t, th, d, dh or n	n
η, ṁ or ṃ	p, ph, b, bh or m	m
η, ṁ or ṃ	l	ll

This is true of Margaret Cone's new dictionary too!

Digital Pāḷi Dictionary (DPD)

A dictionary that avoids all the above issues is the Digital Pāḷi Dictionary. This is a feature-rich Pāḷi-English dictionary which runs on GoldenDict, or any other application that supports the Stardict format. The DPD recognises an awesome 1.1 million unique inflected forms of Pāḷi words. Once you have the hotkey setup, simply select on a word in a Pāḷi text and hit the hotkey, the DPD will automatically recognise stem words to which that inflected form belongs. Then Click the grammar tab to get more more detailed grammatical information about the word; including root information, detailed construction, derivative, phonetic changes, compound, antonyms, synonyms, commentarial glosses, non-Indo-Aryan cogantes, Sanskrit cogantes and Sanskrit root.
Phew..

For more See Ariyajoti's guide to anusvāra

Other audio guides to pronunciation:
YouTube Pali Pronunciation playlist
https://wiswo.org/itp/itp1/
Pāli Vaṇṇamālā (Pāli Alphabet) 21Mar2018 with Audio and Places of Articulation 
http://www.aimwell.org/pali.html

Next post: What is noun declension?