On Learning Pali (Fascicle 1)

I am here providing a set of ten of illustrations that I could simply say are self-explanatory, but their significance would be evident to an absurdly small number of people.

How many people today really have reading comprehension of Pali?  How many people who could read Pali actually spend their time and effort doing so?  How many people even aspire to take on the years of hard work that the acquisition of reading ability (in a dead language) requires?

The answer is, very few: too few.

When I prepared these tables of Pali declensions (to be uploaded to this blog) I thought that I would accompany the illustrations with an article that summarized the advice I've given (in e-mail) to other aspiring Pali scholars (in recent years).  Once in a long while someone writes to me asking for advice, and I had thought that I would re-read those messages that I'd sent earlier, and put together an article for a broader audience on that basis.

In looking over that advice I'd given, I soon discarded that plan.  Of the few people who had asked me for such advice over the years, how many aspired to learn Pali?  How many of them actually did so?

The answer is, too few: perhaps none at all.

People do ask me for advice, but they normally don't want the advice that they receive.  People ask me for advice on how to do the hard work of learning Pali, but what they expect to hear in reply is the (false) reassurance that this is not hard work at all, but merely some sort of vacation.

There are many people who will sell you the dream of passive progress, but I'm not one of them: education is neither passive for the student nor the teacher, and when you're put into the role of both student and teacher, it's absolutely exhausting.  When I lived in Asia, I wasn't on vacation; often enough, I had to say exactly that to other foreigners who met me in places like Laos, Cambodia and Yunnan ("I'm not on vacation", "I'm not retired") and whether you had met me at a monastery or at an archive, I was not there to relax, nor to have a good time.  Progress in language-comprehension isn't passive, it's active: it's hard work.

Even a small child learning a language from his or her parents finds language acquisition to be a daily struggle: in a dead language, there is nobody who can teach you comprehension in that sense.  At most there is someone to administer a test (after the fact) to verify what progress you've made independently (sitting alone with the books).  There is no PhD program anywhere in the world where you'll have someone spending time speaking to you, listening to you, and caring about whether or not you've said (or understood) something correctly, the way that a parent would (or should) correct a lisping child, struggling with words he or she half-understands.

A dead language is a language that man and wife no longer use to settle their arguments; a dead language is one that parents no longer use to converse with their children.  Pali is entirely dead, and anyone who promises you a scholar's paradise at the other end of an airplane ticket is selling you an empty dream (in this respect, it doesn't matter if the flight is going to Thailand, Sri Lanka, Burma or otherwise).  An airplane ticket will not take you back in time; the very few people who study Pali in Southeast Asia learned the language the same way I did, (sometimes even using the same textbooks that I did, e.g. ☛1, ☛2, ☛3), simply through hard work, and, most often, despite the institutions around them (not because of them).

This is one of the reasons why I started researching the (moderately ancient) grammar of Pali (the Kaccāyana-Vyākaraṇa and related texts): I was interested in the difference between the traditional (pre-modern) methods of teaching Pali (and studying Pali) and the (modern) European-produced methods that have rapidly replaced them all over the world (yes, even in Sri Lanka).  The range of facts that I turned up in that research is very interesting to myself (and perhaps five other people?) but, for the purposes of this small article, only one minor point is salient: modern Europeans need to remember that when they travel to Asia, they meet and speak to modern Asians (not fragments of an ancient civilization, and not fluent speakers of an ancient, dead language).  If you visit the parthenon you won't meet the people who built the parthenon; you'll meet modern Greeks, working as tour-guides at the parthenon; it doesn't matter if they dress up in robes, or act out a script in an ancient language.  The same applies to the ruins, the robes, and the ancient philosophies of India and Southeast Asia.

Even if you speak to a very elderly monk, you're quite possibly speaking to a veteran of World War Two, and a man who is a product of modern educational methods, and whose world-view has been shaped by the dramatic political events of the 20th century (more likely, you'll meet a veteran of the Vietnam War, and someone who has never had hands-on experience with palm-leaf manuscripts).  In the year 2012, even the most elderly monks have learned what they know through modern means (and much of what anthropologists jejunely report as ancient wisdom has modern origins, and is rolled up with modern misconceptions, some attributable to unique European authorship, etc.).  I do think that some of this mutual-misperception is a result of the limited language ability (and, for more on this, including the peculiar conflict between anthropology and philology, see my article "Canon and Reason", listed here).

The language is hard work.  However, it isn't just the language that's hard.

Learning the history, philosophy and literature of Buddhism is also very hard work; and the truth is that I've almost never met anyone in my life who was sincerely interested in taking up that work.  I meet a lot of people who want some kind of pretext to go on vacation.

So, instead of re-stating the advice that I've given (privately) to others in the past, I would simply say this: take a look at these tables (all ten of them) and try to imagine just how much hard work it would be for you (or for anyone) to gain reading comprehension of Pali.  It might be harder than any work that you've ever done before; it might be hard work that would never be rewarded (or that would only be rewarded with derision).

I'm very familiar with the excuses that both monks and laypeople offer for not learning Pali: I recently heard many of them re-stated by a follower of the Thai Forest Tradition.  I'm also familiar with the mix of evasions and excuses that career academics can offer on this subject.

All of these excuses are worthless: they result in people (who are self-proclaimed "teachers" and "masters") describing themselves as having 30 years of experience ("teaching" or "practicing") who are, in fact, neither more nor less ignorant today than they were on the first day that they began.  They can read generalizations about Buddhism in English; they can produce new generalizations based on the old generalizations, but it is a process of the blind leading the blind.  The Buddha didn't speak English, and he didn't speak Chinese, either; you're never going to progress beyond those vague generalizations without reading the primary sources.  You're never going to be able to discern the difference between truth and fiction (amongst secondary sources, and amongst the words of self-proclaimed gurus) without reading the original source for yourself.  That's the advice that nobody wants to hear.

He's the one on the left.

I recall a very simple remark made by Prof. Neil McMullin in reference to the Theravāda monks who were then pursuing various graduate degrees at the University of Toronto.  He said of them simply, "…but if they were actually reading the original text for themselves, they would find problems with it".  Indeed, they would come up with original questions that they were uncertain as to how to answer themselves, they would confront unfamiliar facts that challenged their preconceptions, and would not repeat the same old generalizations in English.

That simple remark stayed with me while I was in Asia, and McMullin was right: people who read the texts for themselves know about problems, whereas those who do not read for themselves merely know about vague ideals and generalizations.

The example of the 12 links (that I've already discussed in detail) is a good one: the vast majority of sources on this subject in English simply reproduce generalizations, or produce new generalizations from ever-more-vague readings of the old ones.  Even less popular are the doubts I've been known to raise about English translations of meditation texts: in a language that nobody else knows, and in a philosophy that many worship but few read, to have such doubts is a privilege.

I was present in Thailand when several Buddhist monks offered Prof. Gombrich their own lame excuses for not learning Pali, after the good professor had offered a rousing lecture with the straightforward conclusion that reading comprehension of the language really is pre-requisite.  As a rebuttal, one of the monks suggested that it was not necessary for a Buddhist to understand the words of the Buddha for the same reason that a patient did not need to understand medical science in receiving a cure from a doctor.  Gombrich had the patience to reply at some length, but, toward the end of this dialogue, he did say with some exasperation that it really seems absurd that the point would even be argued: he asked the monk to compare his own situation to the minimum expectations of Jewish scholars (in relation to Hebrew) or Islamic scholars (in relation to classical Arabic).

Given that both sides of this (very unequal) debate accept that the Buddha's teaching involved the memorization and recitation of the words of the Buddha (syllable-by-syllable, as recorded in the canon, and as they're imagined to have been spoken, mythically or not, by the Buddha and his contemporaries) why is it that the great majority believe that those words should be recited by men who have no comprehension of their meaning?  Why is it that there is such a strong lobby in favor of Pali illiteracy amongst the very people who have supposedly devoted decades of their lives to this religion?

The answer, I'm sorry to say, is uniform with the simple thesis of this short essay: people may say that they want to learn Pali, or that they want to study philosophy, or even that they want to practice the Buddha's ancient discipline, but, for the most part, what they are really looking for (or are really expecting to find) is merely a sort of vacation.  Their assumptions about what exists at the other end of the airplane ticket (or the bus trip to the "retreat", etc.) is one of passive progress.  It doesn't matter if you say that you've been practicing for 30 years: either you know the Buddha's philosophy or you don't, and if you read only English, you never will.

A new system for transliterating Khmer

The very idea of "a new system" has a bad name these days (perhaps because the people who propose them tend to be stuck on the notion of newness as the primary purpose of invention, or else because they pursue systematization as an end in itself).  So, instead, I'm calling this "a modest proposal" for transliterating Khmer (into Romanized phonetics).  Hopefully, the notion of a modest proposal doesn't have such negative connotations.

I'm not offering a lengthy explanation of the advantages of the system, because the main advantage of the system is that it can be understood easily enough without much explanation.

If you're already fluent in Cambodian, you should be able to figure out the correspondence just by comparing the poem in Khmer (top-left) to the transcription (top-right).  If your first language is English, but you already have had the (frustrating) experience of using the inconsistent mix of phonetic symbols found in Khmer-English dictionaries and textbooks, you should find this system relatively easy to guess at.

The system isn't perfect, and it isn't intended to be perfect: it's intended to offer a flexible solution that can easily be used with pen-on-paper to take notes (for students learning Khmer at any level).

It does also have the advantage of a one-to-one correspondence with I.P.A. symbols (more on that later) but we should be wary about pursuing that correspondence too far in the name of perfection: with increasing accuracy of phonetic notation, you have decreasing flexibility for the student and increasing confusion for the native speaker.

If we transcribe Khmer with a high level of phonetic accuracy, you would have very different spellings for different dialects, and even for different accents found within Phnom Penh.  The same is true of English within the city of London, England: if we spelled English more accurately (noting the sound more perfectly) we would spell words very differently for people living in different neighborhoods of London.

If you don't think this is a problem for Cambodian, try comparing the work of Judith Jacob to the work of Huffman and Proum.   They both use I.P.A. symbols in a mutually-incompatible way, partly because of differences in their analyses of the language, but partly also because of differences in the dialect (or idiolect) of the speakers they treated as standard.

Now try comparing both of the above to the more recent work of J.M. Filippi.  If you actually did all of this comparative reading (in a systematic way) you would probably have invented your own transcription system for Khmer by now.

I think there are many students informally creating their own "halfway measures" in the process of learning the language, trying to note down Khmer phonetics in the absence of a practicable standard.  I remember being shocked at the hand-written notes taken by two different foreigners in Phnom Penh, that used a mix of different symbols from different dictionaries (with mutually-incompatible phonemic assumptions).

Returning to the illustration that introduces my own "modest proposal": the phonetic values of the symbols are as simple and self-evident as possible, while giving priority to the ease of rendering them with a pen.

For anyone who already has some knowledge of both Khmer and the Latin alphabet (as used for English, French, etc.), it should be fairly easy to figure out the entire system just by reading the single (short) poem in the top half of the illustration above.

The phonetic values of the symbols are systematic. I don't just mean that they correspond systematically to the I.P.A. symbols; rather, I mean that there's a systematic relationship internal to this ("new") set of symbols.

As you can see from the chart below the poem, there is a systematic relationship between ą and ǫ (one is "open a", and the other is "open o"; thus, without any complex linguistic explanation, it is very easy for a student to catch on to the logic of why ę is different from é, just by studying a few examples).  The "hook below" (forming ǫ from o) thus has a consistent, logical meaning; likewise, the "forte mark above" (forming é from e) has a consistent meaning (so it is easy to remember how á is different from ą, because it follows the same pattern as the other vowel-markings).

These symbols are especially good at rendering sounds that are "foreign to foreigners".  Look at the first word on line five (in both Khmer and transliteration: រឿង = Rÿüŋ).  If you were to find this word in five different Khmer-English dictionaries, you would find five different (awkward) attempts to render the sound into English letters.  If you then consulted the dicionaries' explanations as to how these vowels are pronounced, you'd be even more confused.  The I.P.A. symbols, meanwhile, are very difficult for anyone to interpret who isn't a linguist (and, even worse, they aren't very clear or useful in their application to Khmer).

In I.P.A., Rÿüŋ becomes Rɨɘŋ.  If you try writing them both down quickly with a pen, you'll see what I mean about the impracticality of the I.P.A. symbols: it is very easy for ɨ to look like a lower-case t, and it is hard for anyone to rapidly draw ɘ/ə/e without making mistakes.

Unlike many other systems, this one is actually practical for use with pen and ink.  By contrast, it is impossible to write (in cursive script) the symbols that the I.P.A. chart relies upon (bottom-right of the illustration).  The I.P.A. symbols also rely on the eye differentiating too many symbols that look extremely similar.

On the I.P.A. chart, you've basically got the letter e upside down, backwards, etc. etc., and there is no systematic relationship between them in learning Khmer (e.g., you can't guess how a relates to ɑ by comparing them to how ϵ relates to ϶; but, in the system I'm now modestly proposing, these are á vs. ą and é vs. ę; this is both easier to remember, and has a logic to it that is suited to the contrasts internally necessary for the language).

As I've hinted at before, if you have five different Cambodians say this word out loud, you will not get the exact same vowel sound all five times; however, each speaker will (probably) be consistent in their pronunciation of the cluster -ÿü- in different contexts.  This is another reason to shift away from the direct use of I.P.A. symbols when you don't want to use full phonetic notation: in travelling around Cambodia, you need to be able to think, "Oh, that's the way they pronounce rÿüŋ here"; ultimately, symbols like ÿ just indicate a category (of allophones), and not an entirely specific sound.

Is this system systematic enough?  Is it specific enough?  How much is enough?  Frankly, the answer may be a matter of taste.

If you look at the first line of the poem, you'll see the symbol ː in the middle of the last word, ˀąnláːy.  This symbol is used to explicitly mark a long vowel where it is important, but I don't mark every vowel as long or short with this symbol.  This is, by the way, the standard I.P.A. method of marking long vowels, and it has the awkward name of "the triangular colon" (obviously, in hand-writing, everyone just puts down two dots).  Sometimes, in Khmer, it is important to distinguish a long vowel from a short vowel (as in my former example of ស្លាប់ = sláˑp, not sláːp) but it is only important in a minority of words.  Cambodian also has vowels that can be of variable duration, without changing the meaning of the word.  I don't mark any of the vowels as "especially long" in the first four words of the poem (Préy Véŋ viel véŋ = ព្រៃវែងវាលវែង) because what is really important for the student to know is the type of vowel sound in these words (é is not the same as ę) but it would be possible for someone to add more detail (such as distinguishing véŋ from véːŋ) --adding many more dots and markings to the page (and thus making the system more complicated, but also more accurate).

This discussion (kept as brief as possible) has been completely devoted to vowel sounds.  Why?  Because Cambodian has huge difficulties in transliterating vowel sounds, but almost no problems with transcribing consonant sounds.  The one innovation that the reader will see (on lines two and three of the poem in the illustration) is a distinction between ch and cʜ, to help clear up confusion between the different consonants in Khmer that bear this sound.  Despite the fact that I'm a Pali scholar, I actually don't think it's useful to insert further markings to indicate the correspondence to the Pali and Sanskrit alphabet (you'll notice at the end of line six I have láęy, but the corresponding Khmer "l" is Pali retroflex-l, writ with a dot below, as ḷ, looking rather too much like an exclamation point).

The one symbol that may surprise some people is the use of a small circle for the schwa sound (shown in the middle of the chart, corresponding to I.P.A. ə).  This is because Khmer frequently has a very short schwa (I.P.A. ᵊ, even harder to write than ə).  I have seen this sound noted just with an apostrophe, perhaps because Khmer speakers often omit it, or pronounce it almost like a pause between other sounds.  The small circle proposed here is less confusing (when later reading your own hand-writing) than an apostrophe, and, you'll note, I still use a full-size schwa (ə) for the rare situations in which this vowel sound can be heard in full with some duration and emphasis (e.g., I wrote line 8 as "Préy ˀəy…").

I did use this system myself for several years.  (How many years?  Well, my comparative study of Cambodian phonetics and romanization dates back at least 10 years, and there are still some resources on the internet that I uploaded during that period).

A new system doesn't need to be perfect: it simply needs to offer some advantages over the ones that were used before.

What are my expectations for this system of transliteration?  It seems reasonable to assume that it would never be used by more than five people --although it might be extremely useful to all five of them.

Conversely, there are some positive examples of new transcription systems that have come into use simply through people posting them onto the internet, and allowing flexibility for anyone to use them however they see fit (i.e., unlike a government-enforced spelling standard).

For Taiwanese (a.k.a. Hoklo) a new system was proposed simply on a website and then came to be used in providing sub-titles to karaoke songs on Youtube.  Why did this happen?  Well, people needed a way to write the phonetics of the language that could work well enough on the internet, and they didn't find it in the dictionaries.

Currently, the universe of Cambodian youtube videos is dominated by informal Romanization that's neither accurate nor consistent (see the lyric sheets that accompany almost any Khmer song online).  Partly because the Cambodian internet is dominated by overseas Khmer who really do need phonetic transcription (because they're born and raised in Long Beach or Paris, as the case may be) there is a real need for a standard that is "good enough" --but much more practical than full I.P.A. notation.

My own modest proposal can be simpified further, simply by omitting anything the reader finds annoying (I'm guessing that most Khmer would not bother to note the glottal stop [ˀ] at the start of ˀąnláːy, nor the long vowel [ː] toward the end of it).

So, I've set out a simple grid of symbols, that anyone can use or ignore as they please: that's the modest proposal.  However, the one thing I'm not modest about is that this new system is less of a mess than the other systems that I've seen in use in Phnom Penh, from the classrooms to the street-signs.  Phonetic notation for classroom use has driven the development of the other standards aforementioned (J.M. Filippi uses a confusing hybrid of I.P.A. symbols, but it is probably the best textbook currently available, despite whatever flaws it may have) --but the only way to make a system that lasts is to invent a system that native speakers themselves adopt.  In the 21st century, whatever people prefer to use on Youtube videos probably will come to define the written language (no matter how I may choose to transliterate this poem).