Pali Headaches
Thursday May 17, 2007
Recently I’ve been going to the Birmingham Buddhist Vihara for weekly lessons in Pali language. This has been something that I’ve been meaning to get round to for a long time, but I hadn’t managed to do anything about until very recently. Now, however, I’m about three months into the language, and I’m making at least some headway. I had fun this morning translating a passage from the Anguttara Nikaya, and whilst the repetitive formality of the language can make it sometimes dull reading, it is a gift for the aspiring translator!
The course we are using at the Vihara is James Gair and W. S. Karunatillake’s A New Course in Reading Pali
I have no pretensions to becoming a Pali scholar. I’ll be happy if I can just muddle through a few texts and compare translations. But there is something highly satisfying about getting to grips with the entrails of the original language. At the same time, it’s hard work and at the end of the lessons – which can be up to two hours – I often find myself with a mild Pali-induced headache, somewhere around the point indicated on the diagram above.
Anyway, given that I’m trying to get to grips with Pali in a decidedly amateurish fashion (and an amateur, etymologically, is one who loves what they do, so who wouldn’t want to be an amateur?), I thought I’d post a bunch of links and resources for anybody else in this position. I’ll add this as a separate post, soon after I’ve finished this one. I hope that it’s useful!
Until then, back to my declensions and conjugations…
