Pali

Amongst South Asian languages, I prefer Pali, Sanskrit, and Hindi. Pali is for the study of Southern Buddhism. Sanskrit is for the study of Northern Buddhism and Hinduism. Hindi is important in India, and I wonder how good is science fiction written in Hindi. I saw the sci-fi movie Prometheus dubbed in Hindi, which was fascinating.

There are problems with homonyms in a language. I was a participant in a Pali-language discussion group on the Web. I brought up a question about the "stress"—accentuation—in Pali words. Some people imagined that I was alluding to "stress"—like emotional distress—which was not my intention. Homonyms may be a problem in effective communication.

India—Bhārat—is still full of mystery to me. I still cannot differentiate Hindi from Punjabi upon overhearing a conversation. Of East Indian languages, my favourites are Pali, Sanskrit, and Tamil. Pali is the liturgical language of Southern Buddhism, whilst Sanskrit is the liturgical language of Northern Buddhism and Hinduism. Tamil is official in Singapore, along with Mandarin, Malay, and English.

India, or Bhārat, is still a mysterious place for me. I have studied a bit of Sanskrit and Pali, Sanskrit being the liturgical language of Hinduism and Northern Buddhism, whilst Pali being the liturgical language of Southern Buddhism. I am a close friend of Jai, who comes from an East Indian family of Hindu orientation. Jai, a software engineer, is married to a German, Erika. They met in Europe and moved to Canada here. Jai and Erika with two daughters, Charlotte and Johanna, lived in a condo near Kitsilano Beach in Vancouver, BC. Jai tries to speak German. His kids learn German, French, and English. Jai and I used to have lunches and dinners at Japanese restaurants. Jai viewed Vancouver as too big a city, and he wanted to move to a smaller town.

Here is, by the way, a huge question: with the enormous corpus of Pali texts available, the sophistication of natural language processing technologies, and the excess of IT guys, why have none of them, not even big IT corporations like Google, created any translation tool for Pali yet?

This 21st of May of 2025 is a sunny, yet cloudy, day. I went walking in the morning to Tim Hortons café to enjoy an Iced Coffee with oat milk. The other day, I tried their pink-looking Pineapple Dragon Fruit Frozen Quencher. 'Twas more like icy candy for me! Later in the morning today, I went walking to the Roman Catholic church on St. Albans Road. On the way, I gazed at the big purple-bloom Empress Tree, near Bowcock Road. The blooms are starting to fade. In the big worship hall was a small class of little boys and girls, dressed in uniform, students practicing bowing at the altar and oration at the microphone. They looked like mostly Filipino kids, this time. It reminded of my private school days at La Salle Green Hills in the Philippines. Even then, our liturgical language was also English, as here on Lulu Island. It was despite that our household and street language was Tagalog. In the 1960s, the Church globally changed the liturgical language from Latin to the vernacular language. I remember my Thai Buddhist Temple in Vancouver—Wat Yanviriya. The wonderful liturgical language was Pali. It was the language that made the temple stay magical! We learned meditation, which is what I do in the church on St. Albans Road. I try to go when the big worship hall is mostly empty. At home, I try to learn more Esperanto vocabulary.

The Pali Canon is important literature in Thai Buddhism.

For field release trials, two C. p. fatigans breeding places (hereafter referred to as sites “A” and “B”) were selected in Pali Township, Taipei County.

Forty minutes later, we found ourselves seated on boulders on the side of Kuan Yin Shan with a lovely view of the river and the town of Tamsui to the east and the farms and field of Pali to the north.

Earlier in the day, Chen volunteered his services at Loshan Sanatorium in Pali on the outskirts of Taipei to mark his third anniversary in office.