Learn Pali Language

I have received a couple of request now for information about accent or stress in Pali pronunciation. This is a poorly covered area - and I have to add I'm not an expert. But from reading mainly Sanskrit guides and guides to Pali Prosody (poetry & metre) I think there are a few things to be aware of. First, Pali tends towards time duration rather than accent or stress. So in pronunciation, a short vowel is half the length of a long vowel. Vedic Sanskrit has a musical 'pitch accent' that I believe did not transfer to Pali.

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 ...