03/24/18
Filed under:
General
Posted by:
site admin @ 9:14 pm
2571 Sun 25 Mar 2018 LESSON
BuddhaSasana-The
Home of Pali
in 29 Classical Galician- Clásico galego
Language
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBfLtwy4H04
The 5th Tipitaka Chanting Ceremony, Bodhgaya, December 2009
Dhamma Dana
Published on Dec 17, 2009
This Video shows highlights of the 5th Tipitaka Chanting Ceremony at
Bodhgaya (Bihar, India) from 2nd to 12 th December 2009, organized by
the International Tipitaka Chanting Council, (PLEASE NOTE the next one
is scheduled from 2nd to 12th December 2010) http://www.tipitakachantingcouncil.or...
Acknowledgements to the Organizer of this great event and Imee Ooi for
the background Metta Chanting. Additional Clip by the Organiser of the
Ceremony can be viewed at this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKaZ1H…
Category
People & Blogs
This Video shows highlights of the 5th Tipitaka Chanting…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2zUvfvYnxQ
INTERNATIONAL TIPITAKA CHANTING WATLAOINTER
Thong ma
Published on Dec 12, 2016
INTERNATIONAL TIPITAKA CHANTING WAT LAOBUDDHAGAYA INTERNATIONAL INDIA
Category
People & Blogs
INTERNATIONAL TIPITAKA CHANTING WAT LAOBUDDHAGAYA…
The
Home of Pali
U Razinda
Dept. of Ancient Indian & Asian Studies,
Nalanda, India
|
From:
“The Light of Majjhimadesa” - Volume (1), U Chandramani Foundation, 2001
Source:
http://www.rakhapura.com
Pali, in which only
the Buddha delivered his noble messages, appears to have been hallowed as
the text of the Buddhavacana. The language of the Buddhavacana is called
Pali or Magadhi and sometimes Suddha-Magadhi, presumably in order to
distinguish it from Ardha-Magadhi, the language of Jaina Canons. Magadhi
means the language or dialect current in the Magadha. In Pali Lexicon, the
definition of Pali is given thus: 1 pa paleti,
rakkhati ‘ ti pali. Since it preserves the Buddhavacana (words) in the
form of the sacred text, it is called Pali. In fact, the word Pali
signifies only “text” “sacred text”. 2
According to the tradition current in
Theravada Buddhist countries, Pali is Magadhi, Magadhanirutti,
Magadhikabhasa, that is to say, the language of the region in which
Buddhism had arisen. The Buddhistic tradition makes the further claim that
the Pali Tipitaka is composed in the language used by the Buddha himself.
3 For this reason Magadhi is also called Mulabhasa
4 as the basic language in which the words of the
Buddha were originally fixed. However, for Pali now arises the question,
which region of India was the home of that language which was the basis of
Pali.
Westergrd 5 and E.Kuhn
6 consider Pali to be the dialect of Ujjayini, because
it stands closest to the language of the Asokan-inscriptions of Girnar
(Guzerat), and also because the dialect of Ujjayini is said to have been
the mother-tongue of Mahinda who preached Buddhism in Ceylon (Sri Lanka).
R.O. Franke had a similar opinion by different means 7;
and he finally reached the conclusion that the original home of Pali was
“a territory, which could not have been too narrow, situated about the
region from the middle to the Western Vindhya ranges”. Thus it is not
improbable that Ujjayini was the centre of its region of expansion. Sten
Konow 8 too has decided in favour of the Vindhya region
as the home of Pali.
Oldenberg (1879) 9 and
E.Muller (1884) 10 consider the Kalinga country to be
the home of Pali. Oldenberg thinks that Buddhism, and with it’s the
Tipitaka, was introduced into Ceylon rather in course of an intercourse
between the island and the neighboring continent extending over a long
period. However, E.MUller bases his conclusion on the observation that the
oldest settlements in Ceylon could have been founded only by the people of
Kalinga, the area on the mainland opposite Ceylon and not by people from
Bengal and Bihar.
Maurice Winternitz 11
is of the opinion that Buddha himself spoke the dialect of his native
province Kosala (Oudh) and it was most likely in this same dialect that he
first began to proclaim his doctrine. Later on, however, he wandered and
taught in Magadha (Bihar) he probably preached in the dialect of this
province. When in course of time the doctrine spread over a large area,
the monks of various districts preached each in his own dialect. It is
probable that some monks coming from Brahmin circles also attempted to
translate the speeches of Buddha into Sanskrit verses. However, the Buddha
himself absolutely rejected it, and forbade learning his teachings in any
other languages except Magadhi. Here it is related 12,
how two Bhikkhus complained to the Master that the members of the order
were of various origins, and that they distorted the words of the Buddha
by their own dialect (Sakaya niruttiya). They, therefore, proposed that
the words of the Buddha should be translated into Sanskrit verses
(Chandaso). The Buddha, however, refused to grant the request and added:
Anujanamibhikkhave sakaya niruttiya buddhavacanam pariyapunitum. Rhys
Davids and Oldenberg 13 translate this passage by “I
allow you, oh brethren, to learn the words of the Buddha each in his own
dialect”. This interpretation, however, is not accorded with that of
Buddhaghosa, according to whom it has to be translated by “I ordain the
words of the Buddha to be learnt in his own language (i.e., in Magadhi,
the language used by Buddha himself)”. In fact, the explanation given by
Buddhaghosa is more acceptable, because neither the two monks nor Buddha
himself have thought of preaching in different dialects in different
cases.
Magahi or Magadhi 14 is
spoken in the districts of Patna, Gaya, Hazaribagh and also in the western
part of Palamau, parts of Monghyr and Bhagalpur. On its eastern frontier
Magahi meets Bengali. Dr.Grierson called the dialect of this region
Eastern Magahi (Magadhi). He (Dr.Grierson) has named western Magadhi
speeches as Bihari. In this time he includes three dialects, Magahi
(Magadhi), Maithili and Bhojpuri. Dr.Grierson, after a comparative study
of the grammars of the three dialects, had decided Maithili, Magahi and
Bhojpuri as three forms of a single speech. There are four reasons for
terming them as Bihari, viz.,
- Between Eastern Hindi and Bengali have
certain characteristics, which are common to the three dialects.
- It becomes a provincial language like
Gujarati, Punjabi, Marathi, etc.
- The name is appropriate from the
historical point of view. Bihar was so named after so many Buddhist
Viharas in the state. Ancient Bihar language was probably the language
of early Buddhists and Jainas.
- It is not a fact that in Bihar there is
no literature. In Maithili we have extant ancient literature.
Though Hindi is highly respected as a
literary language in Biharyetthe Maithili, Magahi and Bhojpuri languages
are deeply entrenched in the emotions of the people. The fact is that
Bihari is a speech distinct from Eastern Hindi and has to be classified
with Bengali, Oriya and Assamese as they share common descent from
Magadhi, Prakrit and Apabhransha. It is clear 15 that
an uneducated and illiterate Bihari when he goes to Bengal begins to speak
good Bengali with little effort but ordinarily it is not easy for an
educated Bihari to speak correct Hindi. Dr.Grierson has inclined to decide
that Magadhi was a dialect of Magadha (Bihar) and some parts of West
Bengal and Uttar Pradesh.
The area covered by the Buddha’s
missionary activities included Bihar and Uttar Pradesh including the Nepal
Tarai. So it may be assumed that the Buddha spoke in a dialect or dialects
current in those regions. Welhelm Geiger 16 considers
that Pali was indeed on pure Magadhi, but was yet a form of the popular
speech which was based on Magadhi and which was used by Buddha himself. It
may be imagined that the Buddha might choose a widespread language which
was used or understood by common people in the region, because through
which he could propagate his noble teachings to the common people. Thus,
Pali or the dialect of Magadha was more probably the language of the
common people and also a lingua franca of a large region including mainly
Magadha (Bihar).
References
(1). Dhamma Annual - Vol. 19, No. 10-11
(June-1995).
(2). Cf. the expression iti pi pali, eg., th 2 co. 618, where pali=patho.
Further, pali “sacred text” as distinct from attha katha, Dpvs.=20-20;
Mhvs.=33-100; Sdhs. (Saddhammasamgaha, ed. by Saddhananda); Jpts. (Journal
of the Pali Text Society) 1890, p. 535.
(3). Cf. Buddhaghosa: etha saka nirutti nama sammasambuddhena vuttappakaro
magadhiko voharo, Comm. to Cullavagga V 33-1. see samantapasadika, ed. by
Saya U Pye, IV416.(10)
(4). Sdhs. (Saddhammasamgaha, ed. by Saddhananda). Jpts. (Journal of the
Pali Text Society) 1890, pp.55(23), 56(21), 57(19).
(5). Uber dem altesten Zeitram der indischen Geschi chte, p. 87.
(6). Beitr., p. 6ff. Cf. Mur, original Sanskrit texts, II, p. 356.
(7). Pali and Sanskrit, p. 131 ff. By Pali I, of course, always understand
what has been called “Literary PAW’ by Franke.
(8). The home of Paiuaci, ZDMG (Zeitschrift der deutschen Morgenlandischen
Desell-schaft).
(9). The Vinaya Pitaka I, London 1879, p. L ff.
(10). Simplified Grammar of the Pali language, London 1884, p. III.
(11). History of Indian Literature, Vol. II, p. 13.
(12). Cullavagga V. 33 1=Vin. II, 139.
(13). Vinaya Texts III=Sacred Books of the East, XX, p.151.
(14). The Comprehensive History of Bihar, Vol. I, Part I, p. 91, edited by
Dr. Bindeshwari Prasad Sinha.
(15). Ibid. P. 89-90
(16). Pali Literature and Language, p. 6.
The Pali Language and Literature
From: Pali Text Society,
http://www.palitext.com/
Pali is the name given to the language of
the texts of Theravada Buddhism, although the commentarial tradition of
the Theravadins states that the language of the canon is Magadhi, the
language spoken by Gotama Buddha. The term Pali originally referred to a
canonical text or passage rather than to a language and its current use is
based on a misunderstanding which occurred several centuries ago. The
language of the Theravadin canon is a version of a dialect of Middle
Indo-Aryan, not Magadhi, created by the homogenisation of the dialects in
which the teachings of the Buddha were orally recorded and transmitted.
This became necessary as Buddhism was transmitted far beyond the area of
its origin and as the Buddhist monastic order codified his teachings.
The tradition recorded in the ancient
Sinhalese chronicles states that the Theravadin canon was written down in
the first century B.C.E. The language of the canon continued to be
influenced by commentators and grammarians and by the native languages of
the countries in which Theravada Buddhism became established over many
centuries. The oral transmission of the Pali canon continued for several
centuries after the death of the Buddha, even after the texts were first
preserved in writing. No single script was ever developed for the language
of the canon; scribes used the scripts of their native languages to
transcribe the texts. Although monasteries in South India are known to
have been important centres of Buddhist learning in the early part of this
millennium, no manuscripts from anywhere in India except Nepal have
survived. Almost all the manuscripts available to scholars since the PTS
(Pali Text Society) began can be dated to the 18th or 19th centuries C.E.
and the textual traditions of the different Buddhist countries represented
by these manuscripts show much evidence of interweaving. The pattern of
recitation and validation of texts by councils of monks has continued into
the 20th century.
The main division of the Pali canon as it
exists today is threefold, although the Pali commentarial tradition refers
to several different ways of classification. The three divisions are known
as pi.takas and the canon itself as the Tipitaka; the significance of the
term pitaka, literally “basket”, is not clear. The text of the canon is
divided, according to this system, into Vinaya (monastic rules), Suttas
(discourses) and Abhidhamma (analysis of the teaching). The PTS edition of
the Tipitaka contains fifty-six books (including indexes), and it cannot
therefore be considered to be a homogenous entity, comparable to the
Christian Bible or Muslim Koran. Although Buddhists refer to the Tipitaka
as Buddha-vacana, “the word of the Buddha”, there are texts within the
canon either attributed to specific monks or related to an event
post-dating the time of the Buddha or that can be shown to have been
composed after that time. The first four nikayas (collections) of the
Sutta-pitaka contain sermons in which the basic doctrines of the Buddha’s
teaching are expounded either briefly or in detail.
Buddhism: Language and Literature
Peter
Friedlander
Source: “Buddhist
Studies - Lecture Notes”, School of Social Sciences, La Trobe University,
Australia,
http://www.latrobe.edu.au/asianstudies/Buddha/index.html
Introduction
This is the last chapter on the
pre-Mahayana in this book. It covers a period from around the 6th century
BCE to the 2nd century CE. Within the scope of this chapter I will attempt
to simply sketch out various key aspects of Buddhist language and
literature over a period of eight centuries. This will be rather more an
investigation of the issues raised by the these topics than a detailed
study.
Language
Three key terms which we need to consider
are Sanskrit, Pali and Prakrit. We will also need to consider the terms
Magadhi and Ardha-Magadhi. What does Sanskrit mean? It has a root meaning
which does not actually refer to a language as such but to the concept of
something being refined or purified. The term Sanskrit can be found in
Buddhist texts used in the sense of meaning that which is refined as
opposed to that which is natural which is called Prakrit. Likewise in
Samkhya the principle of Prakriti is nature, hence Prakrit is
that which is natural. So in a sense then Sanskrit does not refer to a
language as such but to that which is refined or purified speech.
The languages in which the Vedas are
written are not quite the same as classical Sanskrit which was
standardised by Panini in about the 2nd century BCE. Despite the
variations in the linguistic forms from the Rig Veda, which is
considerably different from classical Sanskrit, the languages of the
majority of Indian high cultural texts are all in forms of Sanskrit. Some
of the later texts, such as the Puranas and the Epics are often not
in very refined Sanskrit, but they are still in Sanskrit. Also from around
the second century BCE onwards Buddhist texts began to be produced in
Sanskrit. These texts are often in a kind of Sanskrit mixed with
vernacular forms and which is often referred to as ‘Buddhist Hybrid
Sanskrit’. They are hybrid as they are a mix of Sanskrit and Prakrit. So
you should bear in mind that the term Sanskrit does not simply refer to
the classical standard form of the language but rather to a group of
related language forms which share a common heritage in grammar,
vocabulary and syntax.
In a similar manner the term Prakrit,
which means ‘natural [speech]’ refers to a group of language forms. Indeed
Prakrits appear in Sanskrit texts. For instance, classical Sanskrit
dramas, such as Kalidasa’s ‘Little clay cart’ include speeches by
different characters in various forms of Prakrit. For instance, whereas
the cook speaks in a ‘cook’s Prakrit’ and monkeys speak in a Prakrit
appropriate for monkeys, the king the leading characters and the narrator
speak in Sanskrit. This is similar to the modern linguistic situation in
India where within a single environment or location a variety of language
forms are spoken by different people. For instance in a monastery in Bodh
Gaya, the cooks and workers will speak in varieties of local dialect, but
the monks will speak in standard Hindi as well as their mother tongues,
and the leading figures will also be able to converse in English. In other
words the use of multiple languages according to social register is a
common feature in South Asia.
There are also three other elements which
need to be considered. First, there is the Dravidian element in the
language situation in India. This term refers to a completely different
language group nowadays spoken in the forms of Tamil, Malayalam, Telegu
and Kannada in the Southern states of India. There is also an isolated
pocket of the Dravidian languages in the Brahui language of modern
Pakistan. This language group is based on a quite distinct vocabulary and
grammar. Second, it should be noted, for completeness sake, that there are
also a variety of ‘tribal’ languages spoken in India which belong to
various other language groups again. These include the languages of the
tribal groups in Bihar, such as Santhali and Gond. Third there are also
languages from distinct language groups spoken in the Himalayan and
Burmese border regions of South Asia.
The situation at the time of the Buddha
was probably very similar with a wide variety of languages being spoken in
the area in which he lived. The dominant Prakrit language of his period in
the area where he was active was called Magadhi, as is the present Hindi
dialect of the area. This name is also preserved in the name given to the
Prakrit of many of the Jaina scriptures. These were compiled from oral
sources based on traditions active mainly in the Magadh area and the
language of these scriptures is called ‘Adha-Magadhi’, that is
‘Half-Magadhi’. It is a form of cleaned up Magadhi, half way between
everyday speech and a ‘pure’ language.
Language and meaning
The most important reason to consider any
of this is that we need to consider how the Buddha would have addressed
his audiences. He would have needed to speak in such a manner as would
have been comprehensible to his audience. Clearly is a situation of such
linguistic diversity he would have had to modulate his forms of speech
according to the audience he was addressing. Speaking to a king and to a
gang of street children, you need to speak in different ways.
Also we should consider that modern
mass-education and media have been rapidly erasing the differences between
dialects but that the situation in pre-modern cultures is one in which
language forms vary considerably over short distances. There is a Hindi
saying that after every three villages the language (that is the dialect)
changes. So in that the Buddha was born on the Nepali border then his own
language would not have been the same as that of Rajgir in Magadh or
Sarnath in Uttar Pradesh. There are elements in the texts of the Pali
canon which can be regarded as indicative of slight differences in
language perhaps reflective of these ancient dialect differences.
Surely when the Buddha was addressing King
Bimbasara he would have expressed himself in a different register than
when he was addressing an ascetic who was visiting from another part of
India, such as Bahiya who had come from Maharashtra to visit the Buddha. I
would speculate that a skilled orator would express even the same notion
to both audiences in different ways in order to get the teaching across as
well as possible. If then you had been listening to both speeches you
would have heard two versions of the same teaching. Were you then to be
asked ‘which was the genuine teaching of the two’ you would have had to
say that both were genuine, although they were different in exact wording
as they carried the same teaching.
The question of how to teach and the
languages in which to teach is indeed addressed in the Pali canon. It is
said that the Buddha was asked when teaching in different areas should the
teachings be in a single language or adapted to the local language. The
Buddha said that the teachings should be made in the language of the area.
So disciples of the Buddha would have been teaching in a variety of
languages according to the contexts in which they found themselves, so
that people could understand them.
The Buddha is also said to have favoured
natural language, Prakrit, over refined speech, Sanskrit, as the latter
would not have been comprehensible to the general public. So what then is
the relationship between Prakrit and Pali?
In a sense the term Pali, like Sanskrit,
does not refer to a language at all. Richard Gombrich pointed out that it
actually means ‘sacred scripture’ and is a descriptive term for the
Theravada scriptures and the language they are in. It is a standardised
and consistent language based on earlier dialects. It is not exactly what
the Buddha said, it is a standardised form of what the Buddha said. It is
close to the Prakrit Magadhi languages that the Buddha probably spoke in,
but it is not identical to them.
The Pali canon features long set phrases
which are repeated countless times in identical terms. Such as the
formulation of the Noble Truths and set descriptions like ‘he saluted the
Buddha and sat down at one side of him’. These set doctrinal phrases and
stock descriptive elements are, however, normally contextualised within
passages which are each in a sense unique.
It seems to therefore be appropriate to
point out that we have no way of knowing when the tradition of explaining
the Pali canon with further commentorial material began. The textual
traditions now extant always feature the main texts and subsidiary
commentaries. It is known than that this tradition goes back in Sri Lanka
to the time of the introduction of Buddhism, when it is said that
commentaries explaining the texts were introduced along with the texts
themselves. (I am using the term text here to refer to a spoken text, not
a written text). This pattern of text and commentary is common in South
Asian literature. It is also a feature of non-Buddhist Indian literature
and a Sutra (Skt) or Sutta (Pali) means a ‘string’ or
‘thread’ and is the condensed essence of a text onto which a commentary
should be stung.
The repetition of set phrases and material
to contextualise and explain them is a feature which is typical of texts
with commentaries. Part of the motivation for this is clearly that it is
no good giving a teaching in a language nobody understands, it has to be
accessible. Likewise even if the main teaching is linguistically
comprehensible it will probably need an explanation to contextualise and
make the meaning clear to the particular audience which is being
addressed. Thus the issue of what constitutes ‘the speech of the Buddha’ (Buddhavacana)
is further complicated here by the possibility that we may have multiple
versions of reported versions of what the Buddha said, all genuine, but
all slightly different.
There is also an issue which is raised by
a reference in the canon to two Brahmin brothers who had become monks and
remembered the teachings and asked for permission to chant them in the
manner of a Vedic chant. But the Buddha said that this was not
appropriate. Despite this the Buddhist texts are chanted, but the manner
and styles of their chanting do not conform to the Vedic patterns for the
chanting of texts.
If we entertain the notion that the Pali
texts are not the actual speech of the Buddha, but standardised versions
of what he said, what then would be the relationship of the Sanskrit
versions of the texts to the Pali versions? The Sanskrit versions are also
standardised versions and would stand in similar relationship to the
original utterances.
If we put aside the Theravada claim that
the Pali texts are literal word of the Buddha then we have to consider
this possibility. The existence of other Prakrit versions also seems to
point to the same truth. None of the extant versions are simply ‘the
literal words’ of the Buddha, all textual traditions are, in one way or
another, standardised versions of the words of the Buddha. The canon
itself contains references to how it is important to understand the
intended meaning of the text and not get caught up in the literal meaning.
In the present day the various Sanskrit
and Prakrit versions of the canon are not all perfectly preserved. There
are large sections of the canons of a number of Nikaya Buddhist
traditions extant in their original language forms and, fortunately, more
extensive translations of these texts into Chinese. Therefore it is
possible to compare the Sanskrit, Prakit and Pali versions of some texts.
An instance of this is the Dhammapada.
This is available in Pali, Sanskrit, two Prakrits, Chinese and Tibetan
translations. The various traditions do not have exactly the same text.
The number of verses vary, the order of the verses vary and the texts of
the verses vary and to some extent even the meaning of individual verses
vary.
The common endeavour behind all of this
was clearly a constant effort by different people in diverse locations to
keep the Buddha’s teachings comprehensible. For some people it seemed that
Pali was the best, for some Prakrits, for some a widely know standard
language, Sanskrit, seemed the most appropriate. For some it was necessary
to translate the texts into totally new languages, such as Chinese. In the
article by (I have forgotten his name) on the translation of the Lotus
Sutra into Chinese there is a fine description of this translation
process. It needed one or more Indian Pandits and one or more central
Asian and Chinese Pandits who would sit together. The India Pandit reads
out the text to the Chinese Pandit who writes it down and then it is
compared for meaning by the various people involved. In the particular
case that was being studied in this article it is argued that although the
text is described as being in Sanskrit, the Indian Pandit was apparently
reading it out in Prakrit based on the evidence of the kinds of mistakes
that were being made in translation. So this suggests that not only do we
need to consider the languages of the written forms of the texts but of
the spoken forms of exposition which were employed. We must remember then
that the text consists of the text, the expounder and the listener.
Linguistic change and the Growth of
Buddhism
One other point about the linguistic
changes in the growth of the canon. It seems to reflect to some extent the
geographical spread of Buddhism. By the second century CE Buddhism had
spread throughout South Asia and into Central Asia and China. Therefore
the issue of how to give the teachings must have been of prime concern in
the Buddhist world. The common consensus was clearly that the texts needed
to be translated into languages appropriate for the peoples of the areas
in which Buddhism was active. But at the same time there is of course the
overarching need to maintain the meaning of the teachings while the form
of expression varies. Within the North Indian linguistic area is was
possible to maintain key terms in forms which were commonly employed,
sukha, dukkha, dharma, karma, nirvana, samsara, etc.
But, once the texts started being
translated into Chinese a new set of problems was apparent. Just as terms
such as dharma, nirvana, samsara present problems for translation
into English, so to is there a problem when translating such terms into
Chinese. There was, for instance, no common view of reincarnation
samsara as a given truth in Chinese.
Interestingly enough the first school of
Chinese translation, the old school, translated by finding the most
similar Chinese terms available for Indic terms, normally finding terms
from Taoism that were equivalent. Thus the Buddha became a teacher of the
Tao rather than the dharma. This translation approach was standard
from the beginnings in the 1st/2nd century CE up to around the 5th
century. At this point the translators revised their views and
retranslated the texts again using Chinese equivalent versions of the
Indic terms rather than Taoist equivalents.
Buddhist literature
So was the canon of the Nikaya Buddhist
traditions exactly the same for all the traditions? I have indicated above
that in the case of the Dhammapada there were variations between
the different traditions. Variations in the number of verses and verses
that are common to all traditions and unique to individual traditions. You
cannot simply say that one version is the original version, yet it is
desirable to consider how the versions related to each other. It is likely
that non of the extant versions are the original version as oral
traditions are often more fluid than textual traditions. So rather than
saying that any one textual version it might be better to propose that all
the versions are but windows onto an earlier oral tradition. There are in
the case of other texts instances where the Pali versions of texts seem
more developed than other versions. For instance the Pali
Mahaparinibbana sutta seems more complex than the version translated
into Chinese from the Sanskrit Sarvastivada tradition. The latter having a
more simple description of the funeral rites and the former a more
elaborate version.
Nikaya literature: vinaya, sutta,
and abhidharma pitakas
There are basically three parts of the
Nikaya Buddhist canon. The Sutta pitaka, the Vinaya pitaka
and the Abhidhamma pitaka. The Sutta pitaka is fairly
consistent in some parts over the various versions, in particular the
Digha and Majjima, Anguttara and Samyakta Nikayas are
fairly consistent in their contents, if not in the exact forms of the
texts.
However the next Nikaya,
Khuddaka Nikaya which in the Pali version contains 14 texts has a much
greater variation in its contents. It includes the Khuddaka Pattha,
a sort of early version of a collection of the chants for daily recitation
and the Dhammapada, which I have already noted has considerable
variations between the various versions. The next text is the Udana,
which at least in the Sarva stiva da version is similar to the name given
to the Dhammapada which is called the Udanavarga. There is
also the Itivuttika further sayings of the Buddha and the jatakas.
The number of the jatakas also varies from tradition to tradition.
There are also instances of completely different works being included in
this part of the canon by different traditions.
The Sarvastivada tradition included a text
called the Mahavastu in the canon, a kind of life of the Buddha,
but the Theravada tradition does not include this text. While the
Theravada tradition included the Vimanavattu and the
Pettavatu in its canon, tales on the good and bad results of giving or
not giving to the samgha. These last two texts are regarded as very
late by scholars. So to are the following texts called the Buddhavamsa,
an account of the previous 24 Buddhas and the Cariya-pitaka which
is an account of how the Buddha manifested the ten perfections in his
previous lives as a Bodhisattva. The very fact that the title of the last
includes the term pitaka in its title, which is a term that means
basket or winnowing fan suggest that it must have come from a time when
the canon could be put into baskets, clearly only possible once it had
been written down.
The Pali canon was first written down in
the first century BCE in Sri Lanka according to Sri Lankan sources. The
traditional explanation of this is that it was due to fear of parts of the
canon getting lost that led to it being written down. It is said that
during a famine there was only a only a single monk left alive who knew
one section of it and this was the cause of it being set down in writing.
You may think it was odd that it was not previously written down, but
there seems to have been a reluctance to write things down in ancient
India.
To return to the contents of the canon the
next part is the Vinaya pitaka which includes details on how the
monks and nuns should live and stories to explain the rules of the
monastic code. Even in the fifth century CE when Chinese pilgrims were
visiting India and trying to get copies of the Vinaya they found it
quite difficult as in many places it existed only in the form of oral
tradition. The reluctance to commit to writing parts of the canon seems to
have been a long standing aspect of the tradition in India. People simply
preferred to remember the whole thing. It was indeed one specialisation
that monks could have was to memorise entire parts of the canon, and
memorisation of the Vinaya pitaka was apparently a common
phenomena.
The last part of the canon is the
Abhidhamma pitaka, a philosophical study of the Buddha’s teachings.
This contains seven works in the Theravada version. In the Sarva stiva da
version the number and nature of the works was somewhat different. Certain
parts show evidences of having been based on similar earlier traditions,
others are clearly distinctive contributions of the various schools. It is
not clear if all schools had their own Abhidhamma pitaka traditions
or they were shared in common by various traditions. The main
Abhidhamma pitaka traditions seem to have been those of the Theravada
and the Sarva stiva da traditions.
The different Abhidhamma pitaka
traditions are acknowledged to be later parts of the canon which were not
in existence at the time of the first council and they post date the
Sutta and Vinaya pitakas. There are considerable variations
between the different philosophical traditions. The Theravada tradition
held that there were only four realities rupa, citta, cetasaka and
Nibbana, whereas the Sarva stiva da tradition held that
there were five realities and included space a ka sa as a fifth
reality. Also whilst the Theravada tradition held that only the present
moment ‘existed’ when things were perceived, the Sarva stiva da
tradition held that things ‘existed’ in the past, present and future. This
last view accounts for the name of the tradition which means ‘all exists’.
Due to this it is natural that the philosophical texts vary in their
contents. Despite sharing a common interest in philosophical analysis.
Indeed the differences between the traditions form the basis for a
Theravada tradition text, the Katthavattu or ‘Points of
controversy’ which outlines the differences between the traditions as seen
from a Theravada viewpoint.
A point of note in this is that in the
Katthavattu the philosophical position on the possibility of
transferring merit to deceased relatives of the Theravada tradition is put
as that it is impossible in distinction from that of the other schools
which say that it is possible. But, this viewpoint also conflicts with the
views expressed in the Khuddaka Nikaya of the Theravada
canon itself, in which the transfer of merit is clearly regarded as
possible. A further twist to this issue is that in the later text called
Milanda Panha a compromise is suggested that merit can be
transferred to some classes of preta, and this is the current view
of most Theravada tradition followers.
Nikaya and Mahayana literature
There is a further question which is worth
addressing here is. ‘What parts of the Nikaya Buddhist canon are
also accepted by Mahayana Buddhist traditions?’ Interestingly enough
though the question becomes not really what are accepted texts, so much as
what are texts that interest different traditions. The Sutta texts
for instance are accepted as genuine by the Mahayana tradition, but they
are of little interest to the Mahayana it seems. However, almost all the
traditions agree on the importance of the Dhammapada as the essence
of the Buddha’s teachings.
The Vinaya pitaka is also a
commonly held part of the early canon. Although that majority of East
Asian and Himalayan traditions follow the Sarva stiva da Vinaya
rather than the Theravada Vinaya, however there are in theory no
major differences. This is of course quite separate from the question of
how the Vinaya is interpreted which evidently varies widely between
the Northern and Southern traditions.
The Abhidhamma contains almost no
texts which are common between Nikaya Buddhists, let alone between
the Nikaya Buddhists and the Mahayana Buddhists. However, there is
a similar fascination with philosophy in all the traditions.
It is also vital to realise that there is
much in Theravada tradition which is unique to it and not held in common
with other Nikaya Buddhist traditions. The great synthesis of
teachings in the Visuddhimagga, ‘The Path of Purification’ by
Buddhaghosa which was composed in the 5th century CE is distinctly
Theravada in its viewpoint. It was based on a translation into Pali
of the existing Singhalese commentaries on the canon and records
traditions which may well go back in origin to India but had undergone
centuries of evolution in Sri Lanka. Buddhaghosa himself was from North
India, from near Bodh Gaya and went to Sri Lanka to translate their
vernacular commentaries into Pali.
The famous Sri Lankan chronicles, such as
the Mahavamsa are also distinctly Sri Lankan Theravada creations
that link the history of Buddhism to that of the ruling dynasties of Sri
Lanka.
There was also a continuous tradition of
creating new Pali texts in South East Asia, in Burma, Thailand, Cambodia
and Laos. It is interesting to note that in this case the argument for
Pali as the sacred language has completely altered. The early argument for
Pali it seems was, as suggested above, that it was comprehensible to the
people as it was close to everyday speech. Evidently in Sri Lanka and
South East Asia this was not the case. Rather it was seen as being the
authentic language of the Buddha. In a sense then it has become a kind of
purified language whose function is akin to that of Sanskrit in India, a
kind of sacred lingua franca comprehensible over a wide area and
felt to be the essence of refinement and imbued with great power and
sophistication.
The Earliest Buddhist Manuscripts
Finally, as an epilogue let us consider
the case of the earliest Buddhist manuscripts yet discovered. A few years
ago the British Library in London was approached to find out if it was
interested in acquiring what appeared to be some old manuscripts which had
emerged from war torn Afghanistan. These were a collection of rolled up
birch bark manuscripts. These are very difficult materials to deal with as
they normally crumble into dust as you touch them. In this case they were
stored in urns and they were purchased in the urns. The library spent a
year and a half gradually humidifying and unrolling the manuscripts a
millimetre at a time and ended up with fragile sheets of birch bark
sandwiched between perspex sheets. It should be born in mind that birch
bark is a bit like vellum, as long as its kept in normal conditions it is
pliable and an excellent writing surface, it only become so crumbly if
left to dry out in an arid environment for two thousand years. These were
then photographed and digitised. They are a very exciting discovery as it
has become apparent that they date from around the first century CE. They
are written in a dialect of Prakrit in a script called Kharoshti,
and the number of scholars it is said who can read this script are said to
be merely a handful. The Kharoshti script was popular in the North
Western part of India and dropped out of use by the time of the Islamic
invasions of India. The group of scholars who are working on these
manuscripts are still working on deciphering them.
The initial reports indicate that they are
all fragments of works. This turns out to be because they are fragments of
old manuscripts which had been re-copied and the old manuscripts were
interred in an urn and buried as if they the body of the Buddha. This in
itself is fascinating as it shows that the Buddhists buried their old
manuscripts, Hindu’s also treat their manuscripts like their dead and
prefer to ideally place them into rivers as they do the ashes of bodies.
The contents of the manuscripts include
sections from Dhammapada, the rhinoceros verses, and verses in
praise of the lake now known as Manasarover by Mount Kailash, known in
Buddhist literature as lake Anavatapta. There also indications that they
productions of the Dhammaguptika tradition. They contain no parts of the
Vinaya or Abhidhamma pitakas and appear to be all drawn from
the Sutta pitaka. However, we are still waiting for further
detailed reports on their contents.
Conclusion
In conclusion then it is clear that the
breadth and depth of Buddhist literature is hard to comprehend. Even were
you to become a master of the Theravada Tipitaka you would still
not have read the greater part of the literature of the other Nikaya
Buddhist traditions. Also to be able to do a good comparative study of
this literature in real depth you would need to know not just Pali,
Prakrit and Sanskrit, but also to access the translations of the parts of
the Nikaya Buddhist canons lost in Indic languages you need to
learn Chinese to read these portions in translation. This is as they say
in Australia ‘a big ask’, however, beginning to map out the dimensions of
this issue is the first step on the road to the study of Nikaya
Buddhist literature.
The Pali Language
Source:
http://www.buddhamind.info
A question often asked is: “Did the
Buddha speak Pali?” If so, how much of the original language has been
retained? If not, how much has translation affected the accurate
transmission of the teachings? There seems to be no one answer to these
questions but I offer the following as the results of my investigation.
The paramount power in India for two
centuries, spanning both before and after the Buddha, was the Kingdom of
Kosala, of which the Buddha’s birth kingdom, Magadha, was a fiefdom.
Magadhi seems to be a dialect of Kosalan, and there is some evidence that
this was the language that the Buddha spoke. The Pali of the Canon seems
to be based on the standard Kosalan as spoken in the 6th and 7th centuries
BC. The script used on the rock edicts of Asoka is a younger form of this
standard. On one of the Asoka pillars (about 300 BC) there is a list of
named Suttas which can be linguistically placed within the Singhalese
Canon.
Sanskrit was also widely spoken and
warrants discussion. It seems to have been the language of the Brahmin’s,
the ’spiritual’ class. It is etymologically older than Pali but, as
regards texts and inscriptions, the native tongue (Kosalan) was the more
common or popular medium. In the Text we see the Buddha encouraging his
disciples to teach in the popular language of any area. However after the
Buddha’s death, what were considered more ‘learned’ forms were gradually
made use of, despite the fact that these gave a less faithful picture of
the living speech. Slowly the efforts to represent the real facts of the
spoken language gave way to another effort, the expression of learned
phraseology, until roughly 300 AD, classical Sanskrit became used
exclusively in relation to Buddhism. This trend is reflected in the
scripture of later Buddhist traditions.
The use of Pali is practically confined to
Buddhist subjects, and then only in the Theravada school. It’s exact
origin is the subject of much learned debate and from the point of view of
the non-specialist, we can think of it as a kind of simplified, common
man’s Sanskrit. The source of the Pali Text we have lies in the North of
India. It is definitely not Singhalese in origin as it contains no mention
of any place in Sri Lanka, or even South India. The similes abounding in
the Singhalese literature are those of a sub-tropical climate and of a
great river valley rather than those of a tropical island.
Being an essentially oral language,
lacking a strong literary base of its own, it adopted the written script
of each country it settled in. It is clear that by the time the Text
arrived in Sri Lanka, with Asoka’s son Mahinda, about 240 BC, it was
considered closed.
Conclusion:
Any historical study is much like a jigsaw
puzzle. Piecing together information from a scrap of parchment here, a
clay tablet there; comparing various bits of antiquity, the opinions and
insights of others; analysing and evaluating - and then - coming to a
conclusion. The more Buddhist history books I studied, to try and
determine precise information, the more opinions I ended up collecting.
History, it seems, can be very much a matter of opinion.
Very few undisputed facts exist by which
to prove the authenticity of the Pali Canon. Even the dates of the Buddha
are questionable. The earliest reliable dates in Indian history that we
have are those for Emperor Asoka’s rule; 274 - 236 BC. We can also be
relatively certain that the Text remained unchanged from the time it was
written down, about 80 BC.
As regards the reliability of the Text I
felt two items to be of greatest importance.
* Firstly: The reason that anything
survives the rigours of more than 2000 years of history is that it is
considered to be of great value. Presumably the reason for this evaluation
was that the teaching was seen to work, i.e. to lead to the transcendence
of suffering. Such a known treasure would have been well guarded and part
of this protection would have been a tremendous concern for retaining the
‘jewel’ in its entirety, i.e. accurately.
* Secondly: After several centuries of
travelling to many different lands and being translated into different
languages, the disparity between the various renderings of the main Text
existing today in Pali, Sanskrit, Chinese and Tibetan is typically
greatest in matters of least importance. Only very rarely are differences
founded on doctrinal matters. It can be seen that these works are clearly
not independent compositions, being very similar in their substantive
content. This “authenticity by comparison” is an important item in support
of scriptural accuracy. More specifically, the Vinaya is almost without
exception, identical in every Buddhist tradition.
On a more general note:
I feel that the majority of us who have
come to give the Text some consideration, originally set out in search of
a guide by which to find a way to resolve the root-problem of our personal
existence. The process of production warrants investigation but surely the
true test of any guide book is its ability to lead one to the desired
destination. The whole energy behind the Buddha’s teaching was the ending
of suffering. If what you glean from the Text eases or ends your suffering
then the teaching has been accurately transmitted. What is of greatest
importance is to take the teachings that seem relevant, that feel
applicable to your life, and to make them a personal reality, to turn the
theory into practice.
-ooOoo-
|
Source: Internet
[Back
to English Index]
last updated: 07-07-2005
29 Classical Galician
29 Clásico galego
2570 Sáb 24 de marzo de 2018 LECCIÓN
http://www.buddha-vacana.org/
Buda Vacana
- As palabras do Buda -
O budismo clásico (ensinanzas do espertado con conciencia) pertence ao mundo e todos teñen dereitos exclusivos:
é a enerxía máis positiva do sitio informativo e orientado á
investigación, que propaga as ensinanzas do Despertar con consciencia do
Buda e do Movemento de Techno-Politico-Socio Transformación e
Emancipación Económica seguido por millóns de persoas en todo o mundo.
Realizando
a tradución exacta como unha lección desta universidade na súa lingua
materna a esta tradución de Google https://translate.google.com ea súa
propagación dá dereito a converterse nun Enterreiro de Rede (Sottapanna)
e conseguir a Felicidade Eterna como Obxectivo Final. Analytic Insight-Net - FREE Online Analytical Insight-Net Tipiṭaka
Research & Practice Universidade e relacionadas NOTICIAS a través de
http://sarvajan.ambedkar.org en 105 LINGUAS CLÁSICAS
Buda Vacana
- As palabras do Buda -
Aprende Pali en liña de xeito gratuíto e sinxelo.
Este
sitio web está dedicado a aqueles que desexan comprender mellor as
palabras do Buda aprendendo os conceptos básicos da lingua Pali, pero
que non teñen moito tempo dispoñible para iso. A
idea é que se o seu propósito é simplemente habilitarse para ler os
textos de Pali e ter unha sensación xusta de comprendelos, aínda que esa
comprensión non abarque todos os detalles mínimos das regras
gramaticais, realmente non precisan gastar moito o tempo loitando cunha aprendizaxe desalentadora da tediosa teoría gramatical que inclúe moitas declinacións e conxugacións.
Nese
caso, basta limitarse a simplemente aprender o significado das palabras
Pali máis importantes, porque a repetida experiencia da lectura
proporciona unha comprensión empírica e intuitiva das estruturas de
oracións máis comúns. Así, poden facerse autodidactas, elixindo o tempo, a duración, a frecuencia, os contidos e a profundidade do seu propio estudo.
A
súa comprensión da Buda Vacana farase moito máis precisa xa que
aprenden e memorizan sen esforzo as palabras e as fórmulas importantes
que son fundamentais no ensino de Buda, por medio da lectura regular. A súa aprendizaxe ea inspiración a partir diso vanse a medrar a medida
que mellorará a súa receptividade ás mensaxes do profesor.
Exención de responsabilidade: Este sitio web é creado por un autodidacto e está feito para autodidactos. O
webmaster non seguiu ningún curso oficial de Pali e non hai ningún
reclamo de que toda a información aquí presentada estea totalmente libre
de erros. Os que desexan unha precisión académica poden considerar unirse a un curso formal de Pali. No caso de que os lectores noten algún erro, o webmaster agradece se o
informan a través da caixa de correo mencionada en “Contacto”.
Sutta Piṭaka -Digha Nikāya
DN 9 -
Poṭṭhapāda Sutta
{extracto}
- As cuestións de Poṭṭhapāda -
Poṭṭhapāda fai preguntas sobre a natureza de Saññā.
Nota: textos simples
http://www.buddha-vacana.org/suttapitaka.html
Sutta Piṭaka
- A cesta de discursos -
[sutta: discurso]
O Sutta Piṭaka contén a esencia do ensino de Buda sobre o Dhamma. Contén máis de dez mil suttas. Está dividido en cinco coleccións chamadas Nikāyas.
Dīgha Nikāya
[dīgha: long] O Dīgha Nikāya reúne 34 dos discursos máis longos que deu o Buda. Hai varias indicacións de que moitas delas son adicións tardías ao corpus orixinal e de autenticidade cuestionable.
Majjhima Nikāya
[majjhima: medio] O Majjhima Nikāya reúne 152 discursos do Buda de lonxitude intermedia, tratando diversos asuntos.
Saṃyutta Nikāya
[samyutta: grupo] O Saṃyutta Nikāya reúne as suttas segundo o seu tema en 56 subgrupos chamados saṃyuttas. Contén máis de tres mil discursos de lonxitude variable, pero xeralmente relativamente curto.
Aṅguttara Nikāya
[aṅg: factor | uttara:
additionnal] O Aṅguttara Nikāya está subdividido en once subgrupos
chamados nipātas, cada un dos cales agrupa discursos compostos por
enumeracións dun factor adicional versus as do precedente nipāta. Contén miles de suttas que xeralmente son curtos.
Khuddaka Nikāya
[khuddha:
curto, pequeno] Os textos curtos de Khuddhaka Nikāya e considerado
composto por dúas estratos: Dhammapada, Udāna, Itivuttaka, Sutta Nipāta,
Theragāthā-Therīgāthā e Jātaka forman os estratos antigos, mentres que
outros libros son complementos tardíos ea súa autenticidade é máis cuestionable.
http://www.buddha-vacana.org/formulae.html
Árbore
Fórmulas de Pali
A
visión sobre a que se basea este traballo é que as pasaxes das suttas
que son as máis repetidas polo Buda en todos os catro Nikāyas pódense
tomar como indicando o que el consideraba máis digno de interese no seu
ensino , e ao mesmo tempo que o que representa con máis precisión as palabras reais. Oito deles expóñense no Gaṇaka-Moggallāna Sutta (MN 107) e describen como Sekha Paṭipadā ou P
http://www.buddha-vacana.org/formulae.html
Fórmulas de Pali
A
visión sobre a que se basea este traballo é que as pasaxes das suttas
que son as máis repetidas polo Buda en todos os catro Nikāyas pódense
tomar como indicando o que el consideraba máis digno de interese no seu
ensino , e ao mesmo tempo que o que representa con máis precisión as palabras reais. Oito deles expóñense no Gaṇaka-Moggallāna Sutta (MN 107) e descríbense
como Sekha Paṭipadā ou Path para un baixo o adestramento, que
prácticamente lidera o neófito ata o cuarto jhāna.
Sekha Paṭipadā - O camiño para un de adestramento
Doce fórmulas que definen paso a paso as principais prácticas prescritas polo Buda. É fundamental para quen quere avanzar con éxito, xa que contén as
instrucións que permitirá que o meditador configure as condicións
indispensables para unha práctica eficiente.
Ānāpānassati - Conciencia da respiración
A práctica do ānāpānassati é moi recomendable polo Buda para todo tipo
de propósitos saudables e aquí podes entender con precisión as
instrucións que dá.
Anussati - As Recolecciones
Aquí temos a descrición estándar do Buda (≈ 140 oc.), O Dhamma (≈90 occ.) Ea Sangha (≈45 oc.).
Appamāṇā Cetovimutti - As liberacións sen límites da mente
O Buda a miúdo eloa a práctica dos catro appamāṇā cetovimutti, que son
coñecidos por traer protección contra os perigos e por ser un camiño
que conduce a Brahmaloka.
Arahatta - Arahantship
Esta é a fórmula de inventario pola que se descrebe a realización da arandería nas suttas.
Ariya Sīlakkhandha - O agregado nobre da virtude
Varias regras a seguir por bhikkhus.
Arūpajjhānā - The Formless Jhānas
Aquí están as fórmulas de accións que describen as absorcións de
samādhi máis aló do cuarto jhāna, que son referidas na literatura tardía
de Pali como arūpajjhānas.
Āsavānaṃ Khayañāṇa - Coñecemento da destrución dos āsavas
Coñecemento da destrución dos āsavas: arahantship.
Bhojane Mattaññutā - Moderación nos alimentos
Moderación nos alimentos: coñecer a cantidade adecuada para comer.
Cattāro Jhānā - Os catro jhānas
As catro jhānas: ter un agradable cumprimento.
Indriyesu Guttadvāratā - Vixilancia á entrada das facultades sensoriais
Garda na entrada das facultades de sentido: restricción sen sentido.
Jāgariyaṃ Anuyoga - Dedicación á vixilia
Dedicación á vixilia: día e noite.
Kammassakomhi: son o meu propio kamma
Esta fórmula explica un dos fundamentos do ensino do Buda: unha versión subjetiva da lei da causa e do efecto.
Nīvaraṇānaṃ Pahāna - eliminación de obstáculos
Eliminación dos obstáculos: superación da obstrución dos estados mentais.
Pumajjā - A saída
A saída: como se decide renunciar ao mundo.
Pubbenivāsānussatiñāṇa - Coñecemento do recordo dos antigos lugares de vida
Coñecemento do recordo dos antigos lugares de vida: recordando as vidas pasadas.
Satipaṭṭhāna - Presenza de conciencia
Estas son as fórmulas coas que o Buda define en breve cal son as catro satipaṭṭhānas (≈33 oc.).
Satisampajañña - Comprensión e comprensión
Mindfulness e comprensión completa: unha práctica ininterrompida.
Satta saddhammā - Sete boas calidades
Sete calidades fundamentais que deben ser dominadas polo alumno para ter éxito. Catro destas calidades aparecen tamén entre as cinco indriyas espirituais e as cinco balas.
Sattānaṃ Cutūpapātañāṇa - Coñecemento do renacemento dos seres doados
Coñecemento do renacemento dos seres doados.
Sīlasampatti - Realización en virtude
Realización en virtude: unha observación atenta das regras de Pātimokkha.
Vivitta Senāsanena Bhajana - Recorrendo a vivendas illadas
A elección dun lugar axeitado e a adopción da boa postura física e mental é outra condición sine qua non de práctica exitosa.
Folla Bodhi
http://www.buddha-vacana.org/patimokkha.html
Pātimokkha
- As pautas de Bhikkhu -
Estas son as 227 pautas que cada bhikkhu debe aprender de memoria na linguaxe Pali para poder recitarlas. Aquí ofrecerás (esperemos) unha análise semántico de cada guía.
Pārājika 1
Se
algún bhikkhu participase no adestramento e no sustento dos bhikkhus,
sen renunciar á formación, sen declarar a súa debilidade, se involucrar
na relación sexual, ata con un animal feminino, é vencido e xa non está
afiliado.
http://www.buddha-vacana.org/patimokkha/par1.html
">Pārājika 1
yo pana bhikkhu bhikkhūnaṃ sikkhā · s · ājīva · samāpanno sikkhaṃ a ·
paccakkhāya du · b · balyaṃ an · āvi · katvā methunaṃ dhammaṃ
paṭiseveyya antamaso tiracchāna · gatāya · pi, pārājiko hoti a saṃvāso.
Se algún bhikkhu participase no adestramento e no sustento dos
bhikkhus, sen renunciar á formación, sen declarar a súa debilidade, se
involucrar na relación sexual, ata con un animal feminino, é vencido e
xa non está afiliado.
Eu pana bhikkhu Debería algún bhikkhu
bhikkhūnaṃ sikkhā · s · ājīva · samāpanno participando na formación e no sustento dos bhikkhus,
sikkhaṃ a · paccakkhāya sen renunciar á formación,
du · b · balyaṃ an · āvi · katvā sen declarar a súa debilidade
Methunaṃ dhammaṃ paṭiseveyya participa das relacións sexuais,
antamaso tiracchâna · gatāya · pi, mesmo cun animal feminino,
pārājiko hoti a · saṃvāso. el é derrotado e xa non está afiliado.
http://www.buddha-vacana.org/download.html
Descarga do sitio web
Descarga o sitio web (versión de Januray 2013):
Pulse AQUÍ
http://www.buddha-vacana.org/contact.html
Árbore
Contacto
Para calquera comentario, suxestión, pregunta:
Non dubide en informar calquera erro, discrepancia, ligazón rota, información baleira · burbulla, etc pode atoparse. O webmaster estará agradecido.
Fácil acceso:
Dīgha Nikāya
Majjhima Nikāya
Saṃyutta Nikāya
Aṅguttara Nikāya
http://www.buddha-vacana.org/sutta/digha.html
Árbore
Dīgha Nikāya
- Os longos discursos -
[dīgha: longo]
O Dīgha Nikāya reúne 34 dos discursos máis longos supuestamente entregados polo Buda.
Poṭṭhapāda Sutta (DN 9) {extracto} - tradución mellorada
Poṭṭhapāda fai preguntas sobre a natureza de Saññā.
Mahāparinibbāna Sutta (DN 16) (extractos) - palabra por palabra
Este sutta recolle diversas instrucións que o Buda deu por mor dos
seus seguidores despois do seu falecemento, o que fai que sexa un
conxunto de instrucións moi importante para nós hoxe en día.
Mahāsatipaṭṭhāna Sutta (DN 22) - palabra por palabra
Este sutta é ampliamente considerado como unha referencia fundamental para a práctica da meditación.
—— oooOooo ——
http://www.buddha-vacana.org/sutta/majjhima.html
">Majjhima Nikāya
- Os discursos de lonxitude media -
[majjhima: medio]
O Majjhima Nikāya reúne 152 discursos do Buda de lonxitude intermedia, tratando de diversas materias.
Sabbāsava Sutta (MN 2) - tradución mellorada
Moi interesante sutta, onde se desvían as distintas formas nas que os āsavas, fermentadores defilementos da mente.
Bhayabherava Sutta (MN 4) - tradución mellorada
¿Que tería que vivir na soidade no deserto, completamente libre de medo? O Buda explica.
Vattha Sutta (MN 7) {extracto} - tradución mellorada
Atopamos aquí unha lista bastante estándar de dezaseis defilements
(upakkilesa) da mente, e unha explicación dun mecanismo polo que se
obteñen estas “confidencias confirmadas” no Buda, o Dhamma e a Sangha
que son factores de entrada.
Mahādukkhakkhandha Sutta (MN 13) - tradución mellorada
Sobre
o assāda (ilusionismo), ādīnava (desvantaxe) e nissaraṇa (emancipación)
de kāma (sensualidade), rūpa (forma) e vedanā (sentimento). Moita cousa moi útil para reflexionar.
Cūḷahatthipadopama Sutta (MN 27) - tradución mellorada
O Buda explica como o feito de que é realmente un ser iluminado debe
ser tomado na fe ou como unha conxectura ata que se alcance un
determinado estadio e que calquera reclamación de tal coñecemento sen
esa realización sexa inútil.
Mahāvedalla Sutta (MN 43) (extracto) - palabra por palabra
Sāriputta responde a varias preguntas interesantes feitas por Āyasmā
Mahākoṭṭhika e, neste fragmento, explica que Vedanā, Saññā e Viññāṇa non
están claramente delimitadas pero están profundamente entrelazadas.
Cūỏavedalla Sutta (MN 44) {extracto} - tradución mellorada
O bhikkhuni Dhammadinnā responde unha serie de preguntas interesantes formuladas por Visākha. Entre outras cousas, ela dá a definición de 20 veces de sakkāyadiṭṭhi.
Sekha Sutta (MN 53) - tradución mellorada
O Buda pide a Ānanda que expón a Sekha Paṭipadā, da cal dá unha
versión sorprendente, da cal Satisampajañña e Nīvaraṇānaṃ Pahāna son
curiosamente substituídos por unha serie de sete “boas calidades”, e que
se ilustra cun símil contante.
Potaliya Sutta (MN 54) - tradución mellorada
Unha serie de sete similes estándar para explicar os inconvenientes e os perigos de dar sensualidade.
Bahuvedanīya Sutta (MN 59) (extracto) - palabra por palabra
Neste curto fragmento, o Buda define os cinco kāmaguṇās e fai unha comparación importante con outro tipo de pracer.
Kīṭāgiri Sutta (MN 70) {extracto} - tradución mellorada
Este sutta contén unha definición de dhammānusārī e saddhānusārī.
Bāhitikā Sutta (MN 88) {extracto} - tradución mellorada
O Rei Pasenadi de Kosala está ansioso por entender o que se recomenda
ou non por ascetas e brahmanos sabios, e pide unha serie de preguntas a
Ānanda que nos permiten comprender mellor o significado das palabras
kusala (saudable) e akusala (indeciso).
Ānāpānassati Sutta (MN 118) - palabra por palabra
O famoso sutta sobre a práctica do ānāpānassati, e como conduce á
práctica das catro satipaṭṭhānas e subsecuentemente ao cumprimento dos
sete bojjhaṅgas.
Saḷāyatanavibhaṅga Sutta (MN 137) (extracto) - tradución mellorada
Neste profundo e moi interesante sutta, o Buda define entre outras
cousas cales son as investigacións de sentimentos mentais agradables,
desagradables e neutrales, e tamén define a expresión que se atopa na
descrición estándar do Buda: “anuttaro purisadammasārathī”.
Indriyabhāvanā Sutta (MN 152) - palabra por palabra
Este sutta ofrece tres enfoques para a práctica da restrición de
sentido, que conteñen instrucións adicionais que complementan as
fórmulas Indriyesu Guttadvāratā.
—— oooOooo ——
http://www.buddha-vacana.org/sutta/samyutta.html
Árbore
">Saṃyutta Nikāya
- Os discursos clasificados -
[saṃyutta: grupo]
Os discursos do Saṃyutta Nikāya divídense segundo o seu tema en 56 saṃyuttas, que están agrupados en cinco vaggas.
Vibhaṅga Sutta (SN 12.2) - palabra por palabra
Unha explicación detallada da paṭicca samuppāda, cunha definición de cada un dos doce enlaces.
Cetanā Sutta (SN 12.38) - tradución mellorada
Aquí o Buda explica como cetaná, xunto co reflexivo e anusaya, actúan como base para viññāṇa.
Upādāna Sutta (SN 12.52) - tradución mellorada
Esta é unha lección moi esclarecedora que revela mediante a cal o
mecanismo psicolóxico adxudícase e explica como pode ser facilmente
substituído por consideracións saudables para desfacerse del.
Puttamaṃsūpama Sutta (SN 12.63) - tradución mellorada
O Buda ofrece aquí catro similes impresionantes e inspiradores para explicar como deben ser considerados os catro āhāras.
Sanidāna Sutta (SN 14.12) - tradución mellorada
Unha marabillosa explicación de como as percepcións convértense en accións, máis ilustradas polo símil da antorcha ardente. ¡Mantéñase diligentemente consciente de disipar pensamentos inofensivos!
Āṇi Sutta (SN 20.7) - palabra por palabra
Unha
cousa moi importante nos recorda o Buda: para o noso propio beneficio,
así como para o beneficio das xeracións aínda por vencer, debemos darlle
a maior importancia ás súas propias palabras reais, e non tanto a quen
máis finge hoxe en día ou finxiu no pasado para ser un profesor propio (Dhamma).
Samādhi Sutta (SN 22.5) - palabra por palabra
O Buda exhorta aos seus seguidores a que desenvolvan a concentración
para que poidan practicar coñecementos sobre o xurdimento e falecemento
dos cinco agregados, despois de que defina o que significa ao xurdir e
morrer dos agregados, en termos de orixe dependente.
Paṭisallāṇa Sutta (SN 22.6) - sen tradución
O Buda exhorta aos seus seguidores a practicar a reclusión para que
poidan practicar coñecementos sobre o xurdimento e falecemento dos cinco
agregados, despois de que defina o que significa ao xurdir e morrer dos
agregados, en termos de orixe dependente.
Upādāparitassanā Sutta (SN 22,8) - palabra por palabra
A aparición e cesamento do sufrimento ocorre nos cinco agregados.
Nandikkhaya Sutta (SN 22,51) - palabra por palabra
Como operar a destrución de pracer.
Anattalakkhana Sutta (SN 22.59) - palabra por palabra
Neste famoso sutta, o Buda expón por primeira vez o seu ensino sobre anatta.
Khajjanīya Sutta (SN 22.79) {extracto} - palabra por palabra
Este sutta proporciona unha definición sucinta dos cinco khandhas.
Suddhika Sutta (SN 29.1) - tradución mellorada
Os distintos tipos de nāgas.
Suddhika Sutta (SN 30.1) - tradución mellorada
Os diferentes tipos de supaṇṇas (aka garudas).
Suddhika Sutta (SN 31.1) - tradución mellorada
Os diferentes tipos de gandhabba devas.
Suddhika Sutta (SN 32.1) - tradución mellorada
Os diferentes tipos de devas na nube.
Samāpattimūlakaṭhiti Sutta (SN 34.11) - tradución mellorada
Alcanzar a concentración e manter a concentración.
Pubbesambodha Sutta (SN 35.13) - palabra por palabra
O Buda define o seu significado por fascinación, desvantaxe e
emancipación no caso das esferas de sentido interno, e entón declara que
o seu espertar non era nin máis nin menos que entender.
Abhinanda Sutta (SN 35.20) - palabra por palabra
Non hai fuga para quen deleite os obxectos sensuais.
Migajāla Sutta (SN 35.46) - tradución mellorada
Por que a verdadeira soidade é tan difícil de atopar? O Buda explica por que, sen importar onde se vaia, os teus compañeiros máis irritantes sempre agreden.
Avijjāpahāna Sutta (SN 35.53) - palabra por palabra
Un discurso moi sinxelo, aínda veo
Sabbupādānapariññā Sutta (SN 35.60) - palabra por palabra
O Buda, ao expresar a comprensión completa de todo o apego, dá unha
explicación profunda e aínda moi clara: o contacto xorde a partir de
tres fenómenos.
Migajāla Sutta Sutta (SN 35.64) (extracto) - palabra por palabra
Algúns
neófitos (e moitas veces podemos contarnos entre eles) ás veces queren
crer que é posible deleitarse nos praceres sensuais sen dar lugar a
apego ou sufrimento. O Buda ensina a Migajāla que isto é francamente imposible.
Adantāgutta Sutta (SN 35.94) - palabra por palabra
Aquí
está un deses consellos que son tan fáciles de entender co
entendemento, pero tan difíciles de entender en niveis máis profundos
porque as nosas vistas erradas interfiran constantemente no proceso. Polo tanto, necesitamos repetilo a miúdo, aínda que poida parecer aburrido.
Pamādavihārī Sutta (SN 35.97) - palabra por palabra
O que fai a diferenza entre quen vive con neglixencia e quen vive coa vixilancia.
Sakkapañhā Sutta Sutta (SN 35.118) - palabra por palabra
O Buda dá unha resposta bastante simple á pregunta de Sakka: cal é a
razón pola que algunhas persoas alcanzan o obxectivo final mentres que
outras non?
Rūpārāma Sutta (SN 35.137) - palabra por palabra
O Buda explica por nós unha vez máis, de outro xeito, a causa eo cesamento do sufrimento. Ten lugar no medio do que seguimos facendo todo o día e toda a noite.
Aniccanibbānasappāya Sutta (SN 35.147) - palabra por palabra
Aquí están as instrucións de hardcore vipassanā que abordan a
percepción da impermanencia para os meditadores avanzados que esperan
con ansia alcanzar Nibbāna.
Ajjhattānattahetu Sutta (SN 35.142) - palabra por palabra
Como investigar as causas do xurdimento dos órganos sensoriais, en que
a característica de si mesmo non pode ser máis fácil de comprender,
permite a transferencia deste comprensión ao seu caso.
Samudda Sutta (SN 35.229) - tradución mellorada
O que é o océano na disciplina dos nobres. ¡Coidado de non afundir nel!
Pahāna Sutta (SN 36.3) - tradución mellorada
A relación entre os tres tipos de vedanā e tres dos anusayas.
Daṭṭhabba Sutta (SN 36.5) - tradución mellorada
Como se deben ver os tres tipos de vedanā (sentimentos).
Salla Sutta (SN 36.6) - tradución mellorada
Cando
se tira pola frecha da dor física, unha persoa imprudente empeora as
cousas mellorando a angustia mental encima, como se fose disparado por
dúas frechas. Un sabio sente a picadura dunha única frecha.
Anicca Sutta (SN 36.9) - tradución mellorada
Sete características de vedanā (sentimentos), que tamén son aplicables
aos outros catro khandhas (SN 22.21) e cada un dos doce enlaces de
paṭicca · samuppāda (SN 12,20).
Phassamūlaka Sutta (SN 36.10) - palabra por palabra
Os tres tipos de sentimentos están enraizados en tres tipos de contactos.
Aṭṭhasata Sutta (SN 36.22) - tradución mellorada
O Buda expón vedanās de sete xeitos diferentes, analizándoos en dúas,
tres, cinco, seis, dezaoito, trinta e seis ou cen oito categorías.
Nirāmisa Sutta (SN 36.31) (extracto) - palabra por palabra
Podemos entender aquí que o pīti, aínda que moitas veces aparece como bojjhaṅga, tamén pode ser ás veces akusala. Esta pasaxe tamén inclúe unha definición dos cinco kāmaguṇā.
Dhammavādīpañhā Sutta (SN 38.3) - tradución mellorada
Quen profesa o Dhamma no mundo (dhamma · vādī)? Quen practica ben (su · p · paṭipanna)? Quen está saíndo ben (su · gata)?
Dukkara Sutta (SN 39.16) - tradución mellorada
¿Que é difícil facer neste ensino e disciplina?
Vibhaṅga Sutta (SN 45.8) - palabra por palabra
Aquí o Buda define precisamente cada factor do oito e nobre camiño.
Āgantuka Sutta (SN 45.159) - tradución mellorada
Como o Camiño Nobre traballa co abhiññā de varios dhammas como hóspede acollendo varios tipos de visitantes.
Kusala Sutta (SN 46.32) - palabra por palabra
Todo o que é vantaxoso únese nunha cousa.
Āhāra Sutta (SN 46.51) - tradución mellorada
O Buda describe como podemos “alimentar” ou “morrer de fame” os
obstáculos e os factores de iluminación segundo o xeito no que nós
aplicamos a nosa atención.
Saṅgārava Sutta (SN 46.55) (extracto) - tradución mellorada
Unha fermosa serie de similes para explicar como os cinco nīvaraṇas
(obstáculos) afectan a pureza da mente e a súa capacidade de percibir a
realidade tal como é.
Sati Sutta (SN 47.35) - palabra por palabra
Neste sutta, o Buda recorda aos bhikkhus que sexan satos e sampajānos, e entón define estes dous términos.
Vibhaṅga Sutta (SN 47.40) - palabra por palabra
O satipaṭṭhānas ensinou en breve.
Daṭṭhabba Sutta (SN 48.8) - tradución mellorada
Cada un dos cinco indriyas espirituais dise que se pode ver nun dhamma catro veces.
Saṃkhitta Sutta (SN 48.14) - tradución mellorada
O cumprimento dos mesmos é todo o que debemos facer, e esta é a medida da nosa liberación.
Vibhaṅga Sutta (SN 48.38) - tradución mellorada
Aquí o Buda define os cinco indriyas sensibles.
Uppaṭipāṭika Sutta (SN 48.40)
Sāketa Sutta (SN 48.43) (extracto) - tradución mellorada
Neste sutta, o Buda afirma que as balas e os indriyas poden considerarse como unha mesma cousa ou dúas cousas distintas.
Patiṭṭhita Sutta (SN 48.56) - tradución mellorada
Hai un estado mental a través do cal todas as cinco facultades espirituais son perfeccionadas.
Bīja Sutta (SN 49.24) - tradución mellorada
Un fermoso símil que ilustra como é a virtude fundamental para a práctica dos catro esforzos xustos.
Gantha Sutta (SN 50.102) - tradución mellorada
Este sutta está baseado na interesante lista dos catro “nós
corporais”, e promove o desenvolvemento dos cinco puntos fortes
espirituais.
Viraddha Sutta (SN 51.2) - tradución mellorada
Quen descoida estes descoidos o nobre camiño.
Chandasamādhi Sutta (SN 51.13) - tradución mellorada
Este sutta explica claramente o significado das fórmulas que describen a práctica das iddhi · pādas.
Samaṇabrāhmaṇa Sutta (SN 51.17) - tradución mellorada
Mentres no pasado, no futuro ou na actualidade, o que exercerá poderes
supernormales desenvolveu e practicaba asiduamente catro cousas.
Vidhā Sutta (SN 53.36) - tradución mellorada
Recoméndase aos jhānas desfacerse dos tres tipos de presunción, que están relacionados coa comparación cos demais. Faino
claro que, se hai algunha xerarquía na Sangha, é só para fins prácticos
e non debe ser considerado como representativo de ningunha realidade. Non está ben claro se se trata dun sutta repetindo 16 veces o mesmo,
ou 16 suttas agrupados, ou 4 suttas que conteñen cada 4 repeticións.
Padīpopama Sutta (SN 54.8) - palabra por palabra
Aquí o Buda explica ānāpānassati e recoméndalo por varios fins: abandonar as impurezas brutas, ao desenvolver os oito jhānas.
Saraṇānisakka Sutta (SN 55.24) - tradución mellorada
Neste interesante discurso, o Buda afirma que nin sequera ten que ter
unha forte confianza no Buda, Dhamma e Sangha para converterse nun
gañador do fluxo no momento da morte.
Mahānāma Sutta (SN 55.37) - tradución mellorada
O que significa ser un deixe laico laico, dotado de virtude, convicción, xenerosidade e discernimento.
Aṅga Sutta (SN 55.50) - palabra por palabra
Os catro sotāpattiyaṅgas (factores de entrada de fluxo).
Samādhi Sutta (SN 56.1) - palabra por palabra
O Buda exhorta aos bhikkhus a practicar samādhi, pois conduce á
comprensión das catro nobres verdades na súa verdadeira natureza.
Paṭisallāna Sutta (SN 56.2) - palabra por palabra
O Buda exhorta aos bhikkhus a practicar a paṭisallāna, pois conduce á
comprensión das catro nobres verdades na súa verdadeira natureza.
Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta (SN 56.11) - palabra por palabra
Este é sen dúbida o sutta máis famoso da literatura de Pali. O Buda expón os catro ariya-saccas por primeira vez.
Saṅkāsanā Sutta (SN 56.19) - tradución mellorada
A ensinanza das catro verdades nobres, por aburrido que pareza á mente
errante, é realmente moi profunda ea mente pode dedicarse todo o tempo a
investigar.
Siṃsapāvana Sutta (SN 56.31) - palabra por palabra
O famoso sutta onde o Buda afirma que non ten interese nas ensinanzas que non están inmediatamente relacionadas co obxectivo.
Daṇḍa Sutta (SN 56.33) - tradución mellorada
O símil contante do pau.
—— oooOooo ——
http://www.buddha-vacana.org/sutta/anguttara.html
">Aṅguttara Nikāya
- Os discursos dun factor adicional -
[aṅg: factor | uttara: adicional]
O Aṅguttara Nikāya contén miles de discursos curtos, que teñen a particularidade de ser estruturados como enumeracións. Está
dividido en once seccións, a primeira en relación a enumeracións dun
elemento, a segunda coas dúas de elementos, etc. O Buda, que nunca
empregou a escritura, pediu aos seus oíntes que estivesen atentos e
memorizar as súas instrucións. Para facer as palabras máis claras posible e facilitar esta
memorización, moitas veces presentou o seu ensino en forma de
enumeracións.
Nipātas
1. Ekaka Nipāta 7. Sattaka Nipāta
2. Duka Nipāta 8. Aṭṭhaka Nipāta
3. Tika Nipāta 9. Navaka Nipāta
4. Catuka Nipāta 10. Dasaka Nipāta
5. Pañcaka Nipāta 11. Ekādasaka Nipāta
6. Chakka Nipāta
—— oooOooo ——
1. Ekaka Nipāta
Rūpādi Vagga (AN 1.1-10) - palabra por palabra
Existen cinco tipos de obxectos de sentido que dominan a mente de (a maioría) dos seres humanos máis que outros.
Nīvaraṇappahāna Vagga (AN 1.11-20) - palabra por palabra
Os cinco domos que nutren de forma máis eficiente os cinco obstáculos e as cinco formas máis efectivas de disipar.
Akammaniya Vagga (AN 1.21-30) - palabra por palabra
A mente pode ser o noso peor inimigo ou o noso mellor amigo.
Adanta Vagga (AN 1.31-40) - tradución mellorada
A mente pode ser o noso peor inimigo ou o noso mellor amigo.
Udakarahaka Suttas (AN 1.45 e 46) - tradución mellorada
A diferenza entre unha mente clara e unha fangosa.
Mudu Sutta (AN 1.47) - tradución mellorada
Un símil para unha mente que é bastante.
Lahuparivatta Sutta (AN 1.48) - tradución mellorada
O Buda, normalmente tan adepto en atopar similes, está aquí nunha perda.
Accharāsaṅghāta Peyyāla (AN 1.53-55) - palabra por palabra
Practicar a boa vontade é un regalo digno.
Kusala Suttas (AN 1.56-73) - palabra por palabra
Que produce e que elimina os estados mentales saudables e inhóspitos.
Pamāda Suttas (AN 1.58-59) - tradución mellorada
Nada é tan desfavorable como este.
Pamādādi Vagga (AN 1.81-97) - palabra por palabra
O Buda repetidamente advírtanos contra a descoidada.
Kāyagatāsati Vagga (AN 1.563-574) (extractos) - tradución mellorada
O Buda fala en gran eloxio da atención dirixida ao corpo.
—— oooOooo ——
2. Duka Nipāta
Appaṭivāna Sutta (AN 2.5) - tradución mellorada
Como debemos adestrarnos se desexamos chegar ao espertar.
Cariya Sutta (AN 2.9) - tradución mellorada
¿Que
é, despois de todo, que garante a harmonía, a cortesía, a honestidade, a
fraternidad nunha palabra paz dentro dunha determinada sociedade? O Buda explica aquí cales son os dous gardiáns do mundo.
Ekaṃsena Sutta (AN 2.18) - tradución mellorada
Aquí hai unha cousa que o Buda declara categóricamente.
Vijjābhāgiya Sutta (AN 2.32) - palabra por palabra
Aquí o Buda relaciona Samatha con rāga e cetovimutti, e Vipassanā con avijjā e paññāvimutti.
—— oooOooo ——
3. Tika Nipāta
Kesamutti [aka Kālāmā] Sutta (AN 3.66) - palabra por palabra
Neste famoso sutta, o Buda recorda que, en definitiva, só confiamos a
nosa propia experiencia directa da realidade, non o que os outros
declaran, aínda que fosen o noso “profesor venerado”.
Sāḷha Sutta (AN 3.67) - tradución mellorada
O consello aquí indicado é moi semellante ao dado ao Kalamas.
Aññatitthiya Sutta (AN 3.69) - tradución mellorada
As tres raíces do insalubre son explicadas coa súa característica
respectuosa, a causa do seu xurdimento e o xeito de provocar o seu
cesamento.
Uposatha Sutta (AN 3.71) - tradución mellorada
Neste sutta, o Buda define como os laicos deberían practicar Uposatha e describen os diferentes tipos de devas.
Sīlabbata Sutta (AN 3.79) - tradución mellorada
Ānanda explica por que moi simples ritos e rituais de creteria poden ser xulgados como beneficiosos ou non.
Samaṇa Sutta (AN 3.82) - tradución mellorada
Aquí están as tres tarefas ascéticas dun asceta.
Vajjiputta Sutta (AN 3.85) - tradución mellorada
Un certo monxe non pode adestrar con tantas regras. O Buda explícalle como pode facer sen eles e funciona bastante ben.
Sikkhattaya Sutta (AN 3.90) - palabra por palabra
O Buda define os tres adestramentos, isto é, adhisīlasikkhā, adhicittasikkhā e adhipaññāsikkhā.
Accāyika Sutta (AN 3.93) - tradución mellorada
Tres tarefas urxentes dun asceta que son como tres tarefas urxentes dun agricultor.
Sikkhattaya Sutta (AN 3.91) - palabra por palabra
Aquí o Buda dá unha definición alternativa de adhipaññāsikkhā.
Paṃsudhovaka Sutta (AN 3.102) - poucas información · burbullas
Neste sutta, o Buda compara a eliminación das impurezas mentais a través da práctica ao traballo dun orfebre. É particularmente interesante, xa que proporciona unha exposición
gradual das impurezas que hai que tratar durante a práctica, o que dá
unha referencia útil.
Nimitta Sutta (AN 3.103) - poucas información · burbullas
Vostede se atreve a pensar ou se agita demasiado durante a súa práctica de meditación? Este
é un discurso moi útil para os meditadores que desexan equilibrar as
dúas facultades espirituais de esforzo e concentración correspondentes,
xunto coa ecuanimidade. Moitos de nós beneficiaríamos substancialmente de aplicar correctamente estas instrucións.
Ruṇṇa Sutta (AN 3.108) - palabra por palabra
Aquí o Buda explica o que está cantando e bailando na disciplina dos
nobres, e entón dá a súa instrución con respecto a rir e sorrir.
Atitti Sutta (AN 3.109) - tradución mellorada
Tres cousas erradas, das cales moitas desgraciadamente están profundas, que nunca poden provocar saciedade.
Nidāna Sutta (AN 3.112) - tradución mellorada
Seis causas, tres saudables e tres non saudables, para o xurdimento do kamma.
Kammapatha Sutta (AN 3.164) - palabra por palabra
Aquí ponse de manifesto que a visión segundo a cal non hai nada de malo en non ser vexetariano é errónea.
—— oooOooo ——
4. Catukka Nipāta
Ioga Sutta (AN 4.10) - tradución mellorada
O que o Buda significa cando fala sobre ioga e yogakkhema (resto do xugo).
Padhāna Sutta (AN 4.13) - palabra por palabra
Neste sutta, o Buda dá unha definición das sammappadhānas.
Aparihāniya Sutta (AN 4.37) - tradución mellorada
Catro simples prácticas que fan incapaces de caer, xusto na presenza de Nibbāna.
Aparihāniya Sutta (AN 4.37) - tradución mellorada
Catro simples prácticas que fan incapaces de caer, xusto na presenza de Nibbāna.
Samādhibhāvanā Sutta (AN 4.41) - palabra por palabra
Os catro tipos de concentración que o Buda encomia. É bastante evidente aquí que non hai distinción clara entre samādhi e paññā.
Vipallāsa Sutta (AN 4.49) - palabra por palabra
Neste sutta, o Buda describe a catro distorsións de saññā, citta e diṭṭhi.
Appamāda Sutta (AN 4.116) - tradución simple
Catro instancias nas que se debe practicar con assiduidade.
Ārakkha Sutta (AN 4.117) - tradución simple
Catro cousas que deben emprenderse con asiduidade, atención mentres protexen a mente.
Mettā Sutta (AN 4.125) - tradución mellorada
Aquí o Buda explica que tipo de renacemento que practica de maneira
completa os catro Brahmavihāras que pode esperar e a gran vantaxe de ser
o seu discípulo.
Asubha Sutta (AN 4.163) - tradución mellorada
As catro formas de practicar, de acordo co tipo de práctica elixido ea
intensidade ou debilidade dos puntos fortes e facturas espirituais.
Abhiññā Sutta (AN 4.254) - sen tradución
Como o Camiño Nobre traballa co abhiññā de varios dhammas como hóspede acollendo varios tipos de visitantes.
Araña Sutta (AN 4.262) - tradución mellorada
Que tipo de persoa é apto para vivir no deserto?
—— oooOooo ——
5. Pañcaka Nipāta
Vitthata Sutta (AN 5.2) - sen tradución
Aquí o Buda define en detalle o que el chama os cinco Sekha-balas (esforzos dun adestrador). Este
sutta é facilmente comprensible sen necesidade dunha tradución
paralela, se fai referencia ás fórmulas Satta saddhammā como se suxerirá
no texto. O Pali-English Dictionary tamén está dispoñible, por si só.
Vitthata Sutta (AN 5.14) - palabra por palabra
Aquí defínense os cinco fardos.
Samādhi Sutta (AN 5.27) - tradución mellorada
Cinco coñecementos edificantes que se dan a quen practica a concentración ilimitada.
Akusalarāsi Sutta (AN 5.52) - tradución mellorada
Falando con razón, o que se debe chamar ‘acumulación de deméritos’?
Abhiṇhapaccavekkhitabbaṭhāna Sutta (AN 5.57) {extracto} - palabra por palabra
Como considerar o propio kamma.
Anāgatabhaya Sutta (AN 5.80) - tradución mellorada
O Buda recorda aos monxes que a práctica do Dhamma non debe ser
desactivada para unha data posterior, pois non hai garantías de que o
futuro proporcionará oportunidades para a práctica.
Sekha Sutta (AN 5.89) - sen tradución
O Buda recórdanos cinco cousas que deterioran a práctica, que para
todos os que desexen avanzar na formación son case tan importantes para
coñecer, recordar e integrar nos nosos estilos de vida como o
coñecemento dos cinco nívaraṇas estándar.
Sekha Sutta (AN 5.90) - tradución mellorada
Cinco actitudes que conducen ao deterioro da práctica.
Sutadhara Sutta (AN 5.96) - tradución mellorada
Cinco calidades son o líder que practica a atención da respiración á liberación en pouco tempo.
Kathā Sutta (AN 5.97) - tradución mellorada
Cinco calidades son o líder que practica a atención da respiración á liberación en pouco tempo.
Āraññaka Sutta (AN 5.98) - tradución mellorada
Cinco calidades son o líder que practica a atención da respiración á liberación en pouco tempo.
Andhakavinda Sutta (AN 5.114) - tradución mellorada
Cinco cousas que o Buda exhortou aos seus monxes recentemente ordenados a facer.
Samayavimutta Sutta (AN 5.149) - sen tradución
Cinco condicións en que o que gañou “liberación ocasional” retrocederá.
Samayavimutta Sutta (AN 5.150) - sen tradución
Outro conxunto de cinco condicións baixo as cales o que gañou “liberación ocasional” retrocederá.
Vaṇijjā Sutta (AN 5.177) - tradución mellorada
O Buda especifica aquí cinco oficios que non deben ser seguidos polos
seus seguidores laicos, entre os que se atopa o negocio da carne.
Gihī Sutta (AN 5.179) - tradución mellorada
Neste sutta, o Buda dá maior precisión sobre a forma en que os catro
sotāpattiyaṅgas habituais deben ser internalizados para constituír as
condicións axeitadas para os sotāpatti.
Nissāraṇīya Sutta (AN 5.200) - tradución mellorada
Este sutta declina cinco tipos de nissāraṇas.
Yāgu Sutta (AN 5.207) - tradución mellorada
O Buda dá cinco vantaxes de comer arroz.
Dantakaṭṭha Sutta (AN 5.208) - tradución mellorada
O Buda dá cinco razóns para usar un filtro de dentes.
Gītassara Sutta (AN 5.209) - palabra por palabra
Este sutta foi en gran parte ignorado polas diversas tradicións
budistas: o Buda explica por que non permite que os bhikkhus realicen
cantos melódicos.
Muṭṭhassati Sutta (AN 5.210) - tradución mellorada
As desvantaxes de adormecer sen sati e sampajañña adecuadas, e as respectivas vantaxes de facelo con elas.
Duccarita Sutta (AN 5.245) - tradución mellorada
Outro sutta sobre os cinco perigos da duccarita e cinco vantaxes da sucarita.
Sivathika Sutta (AN 5.249) - tradución mellorada
Cinco formas nas que unha persoa mal feita pode ser semellante a un charnel onde as persoas lanzan corpos mortos.
Puggalappasāda Sutta (AN 5.250) - tradución mellorada
Aquí hai unha rara advertencia dada polo Buda sobre os perigos de poñer confianza en calquera.
Rāgassa abhiññāya Sutta (AN 5.303) - tradución mellorada
Cinco cousas para practicar para o coñecemento directo de rāga.
—— oooOooo ——
6. Chakka Nipāta
Bhaddaka Sutta (AN 6.14) - poucas información · burbullas
Sāriputta explica o que fai a diferenza entre un bhikkhu cuxa morte será inaceptable e cuxa morte será auspiciosa.
Anutappiya Sutta (AN 6.15) - poucas información · burbullas
Sāriputta explica o que fai a diferenza entre un bhikkhu cuxa morte será remordente e aquela cuxa morte será sen remordimiento.
Maraṇassati Sutta (AN 6.20) - tradución mellorada
Este sutta explica en detalle como practicar a atención da morte.
Sāmaka Sutta (AN 6.21) - poucas información · burbullas
Involucrado pola intervención dun deva, o Buda revela os seis xeitos
sen ánimo polo cal os bhikkhus se deterioran en kusala dhammas.
Aparihāniya Sutta (AN 6.22) - poucas información · burbullas
Seis dhammas conectados a non deterioro. Outro conxunto de dhammas moi útiles para practicantes interesados.
Himavanta Sutta (AN 6.24) - tradución mellorada
Seis virtudes con que un meditador podería formar parte do Himalaia.
Anussatiṭṭhāna Sutta (AN 6.25) - tradución mellorada
Este sutta define cales son os seis temas de recordo.
Sekha Sutta (AN 6.31) - sen tradución
O Buda explica cales son os seis dhammas que levan ao deterioro dun bhikkhu baixo adestramento.
Nāgita Sutta (AN 6.42) - tradución mellorada
Mentres moraba nun bosque, o Buda fala en loucura de modestia, satisfacción, desacoplamiento e reclusión no deserto.
Dhammika Sutta (AN 6.54) - textos sinxelos
Neste sutta, a palabra tathāgata non se usa para designar o Buda senón
no sentido común, o que nos permite unha mellor comprensión do seu
significado.
Nibbedhika Sutta (AN 6.63) - textos sinxelos
Este sutta ofrece unha interesante análise sistemática de Kāma, Vedanā, Saññā, Āsavā, Kamma e Dukkha. Cada un destes termos defínese e descríbese despois co patrón das catro ariya-saccas.
Anavatthitā Sutta (AN 6.102) - tradución mellorada
Sete recompensas que deberían servir de motivación para establecer a percepción da anicca.
Atammaya Sutta (AN 6.104) - tradución mellorada
Seis recompensas que deberían servir de motivación para establecer a percepción do anatta.
Assāda Sutta (AN 6.112) - tradución mellorada
Como erradicar a vista do goce, a vista de si mesmo e a vista incorrecta en xeral.
Dhammānupassī Sutta (AN 6.118) - palabra por palabra
Vale
a pena repetir a mensaxe dada neste sutta: seis hábitos sen abandonar o
que non é posible practicar as satipaṭṭhānas correctamente. Aquí pode recomendarse algo de limpeza.
—— oooOooo ——
7. Sattaka Nipāta
Anusaya Sutta (AN 7.11) - textos simples
Aquí aparecen os sete anusayas.
Anusaya Sutta (AN 7.12) - tradución mellorada
Ao abandonar os sete anusaya (obsesións ou tendencias latentes).
Saññā Sutta (AN 7.27) - tradución mellorada
Sete percepcións que levan ao benestar a longo prazo dos bhikkhus e impiden o seu declive.
Parihāni Sutta (AN 7.28) - tradución mellorada
Sete puntos nos que un bhikkhu no adestramento pode diminuír ou non.
Parihāni Sutta (AN 7.29) - tradución mellorada
Sete puntos de comportamento sobre os que un seguidor laico pode diminuír ou non.
Vipatti Sutta (AN 7.30) - tradución mellorada
Sete puntos de comportamento sobre os que un seguidor laico pode atopar o seu fracaso ou éxito.
Parābhava Sutta (AN 7.31) - tradución mellorada
Sete puntos de comportamento sobre os que un seguidor laico pode atopar a súa ruína ou prosperidade.
Saññā Sutta (AN 7.49) - tradución mellorada
Sete reflexións internas que vale a pena seguir.
Nagaropama Sutta (AN 7.67) - textos sinxelos con fórmulas de Pali
Aquí o Buda usa un símil esclarecedor para explicar como sete boas
calidades deben ser dominadas polo aprendiz para traballar de forma
exitosa para evitar que as tropas de Māra (ie. Akusala dhammas) penetren
na fortaleza da mente.
Satthusāsana Sutta (AN 7.83) - palabra por palabra
Aquí hai unha breve e concisa instrución para discriminar o que é o Ensino do Buda.
—— oooOooo ——
8. Aṭṭhaka Nipāta
Nanda Sutta (AN 8.9) {extracto} - palabra por palabra
O
Buda describe como Nanda, a pesar de ser presa do desexo do sentido
feroz, practica de xeito perspicaz segundo as súas instrucións. Este sutta contén unha definición de satisampajañña.
Mahānāma Sutta (AN 8.25) (extracto) - palabra por palabra
Mahānāma pide ao Buda que defina o que é seguidor laico e que se espera que un seguidor laico sexa virtuoso.
Anuruddhamahāvitakka Sutta (AN 8.30) - poucas información · burbullas
Sete pensamentos sabios que son verdadeiramente dignos de entender e lembrar ocorren a ven. Anuruddha. O Buda vénlle para ensinarlle o oitavo, dotado de que conseguirá arahanship. O Buda explica en detalle o significado deses pensamentos.
Abhisanda Sutta (AN 8.39) - tradución mellorada
Aquí hai oito xeitos en que todos os discípulos graves do Buda crean moito mérito por si mesmos.
Duccaritavipāka Sutta (AN 8.40) - poucas información · burbullas
Este sutta describe o tipo de sufrimento que se sofre debido ao non cumprimento dos preceptos principais.
Saṅkhitta Sutta (AN 8.53) - palabra por palabra
O Buda dá aquí á súa ex enfermeira oito criterios para discriminar se
unha declaración dada pertence ao seu ensino ou non, o que pode ser útil
hoxe en día.
Dīghajāṇu Sutta (AN 8.54) (extracto) - textos simples
Entre outras cousas, o Buda define neste sutta o que significa por xenerosidade.
Vimokkha Sutta (AN 8.66) - tradución mellorada
Unha explicación dos oito vimokkhas (liberacións).
Parihāna Sutta (AN 8.79) - sen tradución
O Buda explica cales son os oito dhammas que levan ao deterioro dun bhikkhu baixo adestramento.
—— oooOooo ——
9. Navaka Nipāta
Nāga Sutta (AN 9.40) - textos sinxelos
Este sutta, coloreado con humor sutil, explica como un bhikkhu de
mente reforzada é comparable a un elefante solitario, ambos os cales son
chamados normalmente Nāga.
Tapussa Sutta (AN 9.41) {extracto} - textos simples
Aquí saññā · vedayita · nirodha, o cese de saññā e vedanā preséntase como novena jhāna.
Sikkhādubbalya Sutta (AN 9.63) - palabra por palabra
Que facer se aínda non é perfecto nos cinco preceptos.
Nīvaraṇa Sutta (AN 9.64) - palabra por palabra
Como eliminar os cinco obstáculos.
—— oooOooo ——
10. Dasaka Nipāta
Saṃyojana Sutta (AN 10.13) - textos simples
Este sutta moi curto enumera os dez saṃyojanas.
Kasiṇa Sutta (AN 10.25) - palabra por palabra
Esta é a descrición estándar da práctica sobre os dez kasiṇas.
Girimānanda Sutta (AN 10.60) - tradución mellorada
Para axudar a Girimānanda a recuperarse dunha grave enfermidade, o
Buda dá un gran ensino revisando dez tipos de percepcións moi útiles que
se poden desenvolver.
Kathāvatthu Sutta (AN 10.69) (extracto) - textos simples
O Buda recorda aos bhikkhus que non debían falar e que deberían falar.
Cunda Sutta (AN 10.176) - algunhas informacións · burbullas
O buda explica un significado máis profundo da pureza, en kāya, vācā e
maná, non en ritos ou rituais e demostra que o anterior subxace a este
último, cuxa ineficiencia faise obvia.
—— oooOooo ——
11. Ekādasaka Nipāta
30/03/2555
Mettā Sutta (AN 11.15) - poucas información · burbullas
Once excelentes resultados que saen da práctica de mettā.
—— oooOooo ——
https://www.thenewsminute.com/…/karnataka-govt-gives-minori…
Karnataka govt gives minority status to Lingayats and Veerashaivas who follow Basava Tatva
The Akhila Bharata Veerashaiva Mahasabha has rejected the government’s
decision and called it a “move to divide the Veerashaiva-Lingayat
community”.
Theja Ram
Friday, March 23, 2018 - 20:11
The Karnataka government, on Thursday, granted minority status to Lingayats and Veerashaivas who believe in Basava Tatva.
According to a notification issued by the Department of Minority
Development Haj and Waqf, dated March 22, 2018, minority status has been
granted to the community.
“According to the Karnataka State
Minorities Commission Act 1994, Section 10, the state government has the
right to grant minority status to communities Hence Lingayats and the
Veerashaivas, who believe in Basava Tatva – Veerashaiva Lingayats have
been granted minority status,” the notification reads.
Speaking
to TNM, retired IAS officer, SN Jamdaar, who spearheaded the movement
for a separate minority religion status for Lingayats said that the
community welcomes the government’s move.
“Yes, the state
government has the power to grant minority status. Even the Supreme
Court Judgement in Bal Patil v/s Union of India in 2005 had stated that
the power rests with the state government,” he added.
Meanwhile,
the Akhila Bharata Veerashaiva Mahasabha has rejected the government’s
decision and called it a “move to divide the Veerashaiva-Lingayat
community”.
“If you are really interested in the community say
Veerashaiva and Lingayat is one and the same. Other than this, the govt
is saying everything else. Don’t create differences between person to
person and within the community,” the Mahasabha’s statement issued on
Friday said.
On Monday, the state cabinet approved Justice
Nagamohan Das Committee’s recommendation to grant Lingayats and
Veerashaivas who follow Basava Tatva a separate minority religion
status.
Lingayats, a distinct Shaivate religious tradition, are
followers of the 12th century poet-philosopher-social reformer
Basaveshwara who rebelled against established Hindu tradition by defying
the caste system and vedic rituals.
In their bid for a separate
religion status, the Lingayats wanted to dissociate themselves from
Veerashaivas, also a Shaivate religious tradition, whose followers
adhere to the Vedas.
“We have been asking for the Veerashaiva
faction to produce historical documents to back their claims but neither
did they do it when we were discussing a joint proposal, nor are they
doing it now” Jamdaar claimed.
The movement for a separate
religion tag, which was started as far back as 1942, was resurrected in
2017 after Chief Minister Siddaramaiah’s promise to look into the demand
for a separate religion status for Lingayats and Veerashaivas.
In December 2017, a seven-member expert committee was formed to study
five separate demands, three of which were for a separate minority
religion status for Lingayats. One representation stated that the
Lingayat community members are Hindus and another demanding minority
religion tag for the Veerashaiva-Lingayat sect.
—
Peace Is Doable
The
Karnataka government, on Thursday, granted minority status to Lingayats
and Veerashaivas who believe in Basava Tatva. According to a
notification issued by…
thenewsminute.com
http://www.zdnet.com/…/another-data-leak-hits-india-aadhaa…/
A data leak on a system run by a state-owned utility company can
***allow anyone to download private information on ***all*** Aadhaar
holders, exposing their names, their unique 12-digit identity numbers,
and information about services they are connected to, such as their bank
details and other private information*** [emphasis added].
Karan
Saini, a New Delhi-based security researcher who found the vulnerable
endpoint, said that anyone with an Aadhaar number is affected.
***Yet the Indian authorities have done nothing to fix the flaw. ZDNet
spent more than a month trying to contact the Indian authorities, but
nobody responded to our repeated emails.*** [Emphasis added.]》
Yet this insanely absurd boast: ‘It will take longer than the age of the
universe for fastest computer to decode Aadhaar data, UIDAI CEO tells
SC (i.e. Supreme Court)’!
(Ref.:<http://www.thehindu.com/…/it-will-take-…/article23323580.ece>.)
And, it had been preceded by an incredible joke: ‘Aadhaar data kept behind 13-ft thick walls: Attorney General to SC’!
(Ref.: <http://www.business-standard.com/…/aadhaar-data-kept-behind…>.)]
http://www.zdnet.com/…/another-data-leak-hits-india-aadhaa…/
A new data leak hits Aadhaar, India’s national ID database
Exclusive: The data leak affects potentially every Indian citizen subscribed to the database.
Zack Whittaker
By Zack Whittaker for Zero Day | March 23, 2018 — 20:00 GMT (01:30 IST) | Topic: Mobility
0
Another data leak hits India’s national identity database, Aadhaar. (Image: file photo)
India’s national ID database has been hit by yet another major security lapse.
Known as Aadhaar, the government ID database is packed with identity
and biometric information — like fingerprints and iris scans — on more
than 1.1 billion registered Indian citizens, official figures show.
Anyone in the database can use their data — or their thumbprint — to
open a bank account, buy a cellular SIM card, enroll in utilities, and
even receive state aid or financial assistance. Even companies, like
Amazon and Uber, can tap into the Aadhaar database to identify their
customers.
MORE SECURITY NEWS
Netflix asks you to start hacking, bug bounty program is now public
Dropbox updates its vulnerability disclosure policy to protect researchers
Mark Zuckerberg outlines Facebook’s response to Cambridge Analytica controversy
Securing Facebook: Keep your data safe with these privacy settings
Enrolling in the database isn’t mandatory, but Indian citizens who
aren’t subscribed are unable to access even basic government services.
Other countries are set to follow India’s lead.
But the system
has been dogged with security problems — including, according to
India’s Tribune, a data breach. India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata
political party later called the report “fake news.”
Now, the database is leaking information on every Aadhaar holder, a security researcher has told ZDNet.
A data leak on a system run by a state-owned utility company can allow
anyone to download private information on all Aadhaar holders, exposing
their names, their unique 12-digit identity numbers, and information
about services they are connected to, such as their bank details and
other private information.
Karan Saini, a New Delhi-based
security researcher who found the vulnerable endpoint, said that anyone
with an Aadhaar number is affected.
Yet the Indian authorities
have done nothing to fix the flaw. ZDNet spent more than a month trying
to contact the Indian authorities, but nobody responded to our repeated
emails.
We later contacted the Indian Consulate in New York and
alerted Devi Prasad Misra, consul for trade and customs. Over two weeks,
this issue was explained in detail, and we responded to many follow-up
questions. A week passed, and the vulnerability was still not fixed. At
the start of this week, we told the consul that we would publish our
story on Friday and requested comment from the Indian government.
The consul did not respond to that last email. At the time of
publishing, the affected system is still online and vulnerable. For that
reason, we’re withholding specific details about the vulnerability
until it’s fixed. (Once it has been fixed, we will update the story with
additional details.)
The utility provider, which we are not
naming, has access to the Aadhaar database through an API, which the
company relies on to check a customer’s status and verify their
identity.
But because the company hasn’t secured the API, it’s
possible to retrieve private data on each Aadhaar holder, regardless of
whether they’re a customer of the utility provider or not.
The
API’s endpoint — a URL that we are not publishing — has no access
controls in place, said Saini. The affected endpoint uses a hardcoded
access token, which, when decoded, translates to
“INDAADHAARSECURESTATUS,” allowing anyone to query Aadhaar numbers
against the database without any additional authentication.
Saini
also found that the API doesn’t have any rate limiting in place,
allowing an attacker to cycle through every permutation — potentially
trillions — of Aadhaar numbers and obtain information each time a
successful result is hit.
He explained that it would be possible
to enumerate Aadhaar numbers by cycling through combinations, such as
1234 5678 0000 to 1234 5678 9999.
“An attacker is bound to find
some valid Aadhaar numbers there which could then be used to find their
corresponding details,” he said. And because there is no rate limiting,
Saini said he could send thousands of requests each minute — just from
one computer.
When Saini ran a handful of Aadhaar numbers (from
friends who gave him permission) through the endpoint, the server’s
response included the Aadhaar holder’s full name and their consumer
number — a unique customer number used by that utility provider. The
response also reveals information on connected bank accounts, said
Saini. Screenshots seen by ZDNet reveal details about which bank that
person uses — though, no other banking information was returned.
That seems to contradict a tweet by India’s Unique Identification
Authority (UIDAI), the government department that administers the
Aadhaar database, which said: “Aadhaar database does not keep any
information about bank accounts.”
Another tweet on the same day
by Ravi Shankar Prasad, India’s minister for electronics and information
technology, also said: “Aadhaar does not save the details of your bank
account.”
The endpoint doesn’t just pull data on the utility
provider’s customers; the API allows access to Aadhaar holders’
information who have connections with other utility companies, as well.
“From the requests that were sent to check for a rate limiting issue
and determine the possibility of stumbling across valid Aadhaar numbers,
I have found that this information is not retrieved from a static
database or a one-off data grab, but is clearly being updated — from as
early as 2014 to mid 2017,” he told ZDNet. “I cannot speculate whether
it is UIDAI that is providing this information to [the utility
provider], or if the banks or gas companies are, but it seems that
everyone’s information is available, with no authentication — no rate
limit, nothing.”
That data on the face of it may not be seen as
sensitive as leaked or exposed biometric data, but it nevertheless
contradicts the Indian government’s claims that the database is secure.
India’s former attorney general Mukul Rohtagi once said that a previous leak of Aadhaar numbers is “much ado about nothing.”
But access to Aadhaar numbers and corresponding names increases the risk of identity theft, or could lead to impersonation.
It’s long been believed that identity theft is one of the biggest
issues faced by both UIDAI and Aadhaar number holders. It’s been
reported that linking Aadhaar numbers to SIM cards has led to stolen
money and fraud.
The controversy surrounding the Aadhaar database
has been ongoing. A month ahead of the Indian election in 2014,
would-be prime minister Narendra Modi called the database’s security
into question.
“On Aadhaar, neither the team that I met nor PM
could answer my [questions] on security threat it can pose. There is no
vision, only political gimmick,” said Modi in a tweet.
Now, his
government is currently defending the identity scheme in front of the
country’s Supreme Court.. Critics have called the database
unconstitutional.
Until the court rules on the case, subscribing
to the database won’t be mandatory for Indian citizens. But that might
not be much solace for those whose information has been already
collected.
Contact me securely
Zack Whittaker can be
reached securely on Signal and WhatsApp at 646-755–8849, and his PGP
fingerprint for email is: 4D0E 92F2 E36A EC51 DAAE 5D97 CB8C 15FA EB6C
EEA5.
—
Peace Is Doable
Exclusive: The data leak affects potentially every Indian citizen subscribed to the database.
zdnet.com
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oa7SfpkhKrs
What a big deal!
How about Murderer of democratic institutions (Modi) referring to “Mrs
Sirisena” as “M R S Sirisena” (ref.: ‘Foolish Modi Calling Lankan
President’s Wife Mrs:Sirisena as M R S Sirisena : <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oa7SfpkhKrs>),
that too while reading out from a teleprompter, or claiming that
climate change is a mere illusion (ref.: ‘Climate change remarks by MOST
FOOLISH Modi’
Foolish Modi calling Mrs Sirisena as M R S Sirisena
youtube.com
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAdfHGAJPh4in (a rather rare unrehearsed) response to a school girl?
youtube.com
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-43526413
The protests - under the banner March For Our Lives - have grown out of
a movement calling for change after 17 people were killed by a gunman
at a high school in Florida last month.
It is high time that the
99.9% Sarvajan Samaj grow out a movement against the fraud EVMs which
has negated the Universal Adult Franchise by gobbling the Master Key by
the Murderers of democratic institutions (Modi) of BJP (Brashtachar
Jiyadha Psychopaths for the stealth, shadowy, discriminatory hindutvas
cult of just 0.1% intorelant, cunning,crooked, number one terrorists of
the world violent, militant, ever shooting, lynching, lunatic, mentally
retarded chitpavan brahmins of RSSb (Rowdy Rakshasa Swayam Sevaks)
Half a million people are expected to descend on the biggest march in Washington DC.
More than 800 sister protests are planned nationwide and abroad.
Solidarity marches have taken place in London, Edinburgh, Geneva,
Sydney and Tokyo.]March For Our Lives: Huge gun-control rallies sweep US
21 minutes ago
Related TopicsFlorida school shooting
Media captionAmericans gather in Washington DC for its gun control rally
Mass student-led protests calling for tighter gun control are under way across the United States.
The protests - under the banner March For Our Lives - have grown out of
a movement calling for change after 17 people were killed by a gunman
at a high school in Florida last month.
Half a million people are expected to descend on the biggest march in Washington DC.
More than 800 sister protests are planned nationwide and abroad.
Solidarity marches have taken place in London, Edinburgh, Geneva, Sydney and Tokyo.
March For Our Lives: Live updates
In pictures: Marches across the US and worldwide
Participants want to seize on public outrage in the wake of the 14
February massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland to
convince US politicians to finally take decisive action, including by
banning the sale of assault weapons.
However, the issue divides
Americans. The right to bear arms is protected under the 2nd amendment
of the US constitution and the National Rifle Association (NRA) gun
lobby remains highly influential.
The teenagers taking on the US gun lobby
Why I’m marching on Washington
America’s gun culture in 10 charts
President Donald Trump is at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida for the weekend.
On Saturday afternoon, the White House released a statement praising
the “many courageous young Americans exercising their First Amendment
rights today”.
It also cited steps it is taking to tackle gun
violence, including banning bump stocks, plus enacting the STOP School
Violence Act, which seeks to improve school security and increase
training for students, staff and local law enforcement.
There are also plans to improve criminal background records so gun buyers are properly vetted before making a purchase.
Image copyrightEPA
Image caption
Students gather on Washington’s Pennsylvania Avenue ahead of the march
Organisers say up to half a million people could rally in Washington
DC, which would make it the largest protest since last year’s women’s
march.
Singers Ariana Grande, Miley Cyrus and Lin-Manuel Miranda,
the man behind hit musical Hamilton, have performed on a stage erected
in front of the US Capitol building.
The music has been
interspersed with impassioned youth leaders calling for change,
including 17-year-old Edna Chavez, whose brother was shot and killed in a
south Los Angeles neighbourhood where, she said, it was normal to see
flowers and tributes on the streets.
“We will continue to fight for our dead friends,” said speaker Delaney Tarr, a Parkland student.
Some speeches came from children who are just 11 years old, including
Naomi Wadler, from Virginia, who spoke “to represent African-American
girls whose stories don’t make the front page of every national
newspaper”.
The BBC’s Jon Sopel in Washington says the protesters
there have strung out lines of photographs of students and teachers
killed in school shootings.
Skip Twitter post by @BBCJonSopel
View image on Twitter
Jon Sopel
✔
@BBCJonSopel
As far as the eye can see photos of young people and teachers killed in school shootings
#MarchForOurLives
9:28 PM - Mar 24, 2018
313
207 people are talking about this
Twitter Ads info and privacy
Report
End of Twitter post by @BBCJonSopel
A demonstration has also been held in Parkland, with relatives of the victims speaking to crowds.
Image copyrightEPA
Image caption
No guns are allowed on the march route in Washington DC
‘My lost soulmate’
By Marianna Brady, BBC News, Washington
The crowds started to gather in the early hours of the morning outside
the US Capitol. Chants for “no more NRA” and “no more guns” erupt every
few minutes at random.
“He was my soulmate,” said Victoria Gonzalez, looking down at a sign of her boyfriend Joaquin Oliver..
Valentine’s Day - 14 February - started off as a great day for
Victoria. “Joaquin and I exchanged gifts in the morning and he walked me
to class. I was so happy.”
Later that day, she would learn that Joaquin was one of 17 people shot and killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas school.
“It wasn’t real. It’s taken a while for it to sink in. I’m here today
so no one ever has to face this again,” she said, standing in a crowd of
several thousand ahead of the march.
“It gives me a lot of hope
seeing how many people are out here supporting us. It feels like the
whole entire world is on our side,” Victoria said.
What do young conservatives think?
At a rally in Houston, Texas, Mayor Sylvester Turner called the events a
defining moment in US history and announced a commission to tackle gun
violence on a local level.
Skip Twitter post by @SylvesterTurner
View image on Twitter
View image on Twitter
Sylvester Turner
✔
@SylvesterTurner
“This is a defining moment for our City , our state and our nation. You are making a difference.” #MarchForOurLives
8:07 PM - Mar 24, 2018
114
46 people are talking about this
Twitter Ads info and privacy
Report
End of Twitter post by @SylvesterTurner
Families of the victims of the 1996 school shooting in Dunblane,
Scotland, also joined a solidarity demonstration outside the US
consulate in Edinburgh.
In London, several hundred people
gathered outside the new US embassy in Vauxhall, carrying placards
addressed to US politicians and the NRA, saying “protect kids not guns”
and “books not bullets”. The crowd was a mix of US immigrants and
allies.
Some 69% of Americans think gun laws should be tightened,
according to a new poll by the Associated Press and the NORC Center for
Public Affairs Research, up from 61% in October 2016.
What’s happened since Parkland?
After pressure from students, Florida passed a gun control law that
raises the legal age for buying rifles in the state but also allows the
arming of school staff. The NRA sued the state, saying the law was
unconstitutional
In February, President Trump urged lawmakers to
work on bipartisan legislation, accusing them of being “petrified” of
the NRA. He supported raising the minimum age for gun purchases but
later appeared to back away from that proposal. The White House says he
wants to focus on measures that can get through Congress, like improved
background checks. He has also backed arming some teachers
Several major companies cut ties with the NRA amid a #BoycottNRA campaign, while chains like Walmart and Dick’s Sporting Goods announced new restrictions on gun sales
Earlier this month, students and school staff commemorated the Florida school shooting with a mass walkout
Media captionMarjory Stoneman Douglas students “excited and nervous” for Washington rally
Related Topics
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-43526413
—
Peace Is Doable
Student-led March For Our Lives events nationwide draw hundreds of thousands of protesters.
bbc.com
http://stopgangstalkingpolice.com/dictatorshipformasses.html
Ask: How Will My Rights Be Protected In A National Emergency?
Americans
are being put under surveillance or harassed by police in at least 36
states, said the ACLU. I have personally been GANG STALKED by police in
Oceanside, CA and Carlsbad, CA for four years. Tell the Oceanside and
Carlsbad, CA Police Departments participating in GOVERNMENT GANG
STALKING that…
stopgangstalkingpolice.com
https://scroll.in/article/873124/at-ankit-saxenas-birthday-prayer-meet-a-glimpse-of-india-as-it-should-be
http://www.danielpipes.org/comments/96475
Reality of Bajrang Dal , VHP , BJP ??
Better check the reality and your eyes will open ! VHP , Bajrang Dal ,
RSS fully support BJP . and all top three Muslim leaders of BJP have
Hindu ladies as wives……
Sikander Bakht
Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi
Shahnawaz Hussain
All three of them trapped Hindu Girls and married them and converted to
Islam. and same is the condition of Indian Film Industry “Bollywood” .
Every Khan Actor has links with Jehadis and Dawood Mafia Syndicate and
all of them have married to Hindu Girl and converted to Islam…….
Shahrukh Khan —–wife Gauri
Nawab Ali Khan Pataudi —Sharmila Tagore
Arbaaz Khan —Malaika Arora
Saif Ali Khan —–Amrita Singh
Amir Khan –First wife Reena and Second wife — Kiran Rao
Santoor Maestro Amjad Ali Khan’s wife is also Hindu
India’s most wanted Anchor Mohamad Suhaib ilyasi married to a Hindu
Girl Anju Singh , converted her to Islam , took all her property and
murdered her……..He was arrested and was in Jail but now released
becasue his father Mohamad ilyasi is president of All India Islamic Imam
Organisation.
Former Indian Cricket Captian : Mohamad Azharudeen wife is also Hindu Sangeeta Bijlaani..
and there are thousands of examples…….of Top and Educated Muslims also married Hindu Girls and converted to Islam………
Check the family members of L.K.Advani and Bal Thakrey …….near
relative girls of their family also eloped with muslims and later
converted to Islam………Top people in RSS know it . But they have no
guts to speak against this exploitation.
Go to Assam and check
that illegal bangladeshi muslim infiltrators have forcefully married
thousands of innocent assamese hindu girls from villages and converted
to Islam and now they are forced to give douzens to children to use
their wombs as weapons to destroy Democratic India by Demographic
Warfare…..
I wonder where is your Bajrang Dal , VHP ., Shiv
Sena , RSS , BJP and all other so called Pseudo Patriotic , Pseudo
Nationalist , Pseudo Hindutva organisations ??
This is true and face it………….
Reality of Bajrang Dal , VHP , BJP ?? :: Reader comments at Daniel Pipes
Filed under:
General
Posted by:
site admin @ 7:08 pm
2571 Sun 25 Mar 2018 LESSON Article is about human language in general
Language
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A mural in Teotihuacan, Mexico (c. 2nd century) depicting a person emitting a speech scroll from his mouth, symbolizing speech
Language is a system that consists of the development, acquisition, maintenance and use of complex systems of communication, particularly the human ability to do so; and a language is any specific example of such a system.
The scientific study of language is called linguistics. Questions concerning the philosophy of language, such as whether words can represent experience, have been debated at least since Gorgias and Plato in ancient Greece. Thinkers such as Rousseau have argued that language originated from emotions while others like Kant have held that it originated from rational and logical thought. 20th-century philosophers such as Wittgenstein argued that philosophy is really the study of language. Major figures in linguistics include Ferdinand de Saussure and Noam Chomsky.
Estimates of the number of human languages in the world vary between
5,000 and 7,000. However, any precise estimate depends on a partly
arbitrary distinction between languages and dialects. Natural languages are spoken or signed, but any language can be encoded into secondary media using auditory, visual, or tactile stimuli – for example, in whistling, signed, or braille. This is because human language is modality-independent. Depending on philosophical perspectives regarding the definition of language and meaning, when used as a general concept, “language” may refer to the cognitive
ability to learn and use systems of complex communication, or to
describe the set of rules that makes up these systems, or the set of
utterances that can be produced from those rules. All languages rely on
the process of semiosis to relate signs to particular meanings. Oral, manual and tactile languages contain a phonological system that governs how symbols are used to form sequences known as words or morphemes, and a syntactic system that governs how words and morphemes are combined to form phrases and utterances.
Human language has the properties of productivity and displacement,
and relies entirely on social convention and learning. Its complex
structure affords a much wider range of expressions than any known
system of animal communication. Language is thought to have originated when early hominins started gradually changing their primate communication systems, acquiring the ability to form a theory of other minds and a shared intentionality.[1][2]
This development is sometimes thought to have coincided with an
increase in brain volume, and many linguists see the structures of
language as having evolved to serve specific communicative and social
functions. Language is processed in many different locations in the human brain, but especially in Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas. Humans acquire
language through social interaction in early childhood, and children
generally speak fluently by approximately three years old. The use of
language is deeply entrenched in human culture.
Therefore, in addition to its strictly communicative uses, language
also has many social and cultural uses, such as signifying group identity, social stratification, as well as social grooming and entertainment.
Languages evolve and diversify over time, and the history of their evolution can be reconstructed by comparing
modern languages to determine which traits their ancestral languages
must have had in order for the later developmental stages to occur. A
group of languages that descend from a common ancestor is known as a language family. The Indo-European family is the most widely spoken and includes languages as diverse as English, Russian and Hindi; the Sino-Tibetan family, which includes Mandarin, Bodo and the other Chinese languages, and Tibetan; the Afro-Asiatic family, which includes Arabic, Somali, and Hebrew; the Bantu languages, which include Swahili, and Zulu, and hundreds of other languages spoken throughout Africa; and the Malayo-Polynesian languages, which include Indonesian, Malay, Tagalog, and hundreds of other languages spoken throughout the Pacific. The languages of the Dravidian family that are spoken mostly in Southern India include Tamil and Telugu.
Academic consensus holds that between 50% and 90% of languages spoken
at the beginning of the 21st century will probably have become extinct by the year 2100.
Definitions
The English word language derives ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *dn̥ǵʰwéh₂s “tongue, speech, language” through Latin lingua, “language; tongue”, and Old French language.[3] The word is sometimes used to refer to codes, ciphers, and other kinds of artificially constructed communication systems such as formally defined computer languages used for computer programming. Unlike conventional human languages, a formal language in this sense is a system of signs for encoding and decoding information. This article specifically concerns the properties of natural human language as it is studied in the discipline of linguistics.
As an object of linguistic study, “language” has two primary
meanings: an abstract concept, and a specific linguistic system, e.g. “French“. The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, who defined the modern discipline of linguistics, first explicitly formulated the distinction using the French word langage for language as a concept, langue as a specific instance of a language system, and parole for the concrete usage of speech in a particular language.[4]
When speaking of language as a general concept, definitions can be used which stress different aspects of the phenomenon.[5]
These definitions also entail different approaches and understandings
of language, and they also inform different and often incompatible
schools of linguistic theory.[6] Debates about the nature and origin of language go back to the ancient world. Greek philosophers such as Gorgias and Plato
debated the relation between words, concepts and reality. Gorgias
argued that language could represent neither the objective experience
nor human experience, and that communication and truth were therefore
impossible. Plato maintained that communication is possible because
language represents ideas and concepts that exist independently of, and
prior to, language.
During the Enlightenment and its debates about human origins, it became fashionable to speculate about the origin of language. Thinkers such as Rousseau and Herder
argued that language had originated in the instinctive expression of
emotions, and that it was originally closer to music and poetry than to
the logical expression of rational thought. Rationalist philosophers
such as Kant and Descartes
held the opposite view. Around the turn of the 20th century, thinkers
began to wonder about the role of language in shaping our experiences of
the world – asking whether language simply reflects the objective
structure of the world, or whether it creates concepts that it in turn
imposes on our experience of the objective world. This led to the
question of whether philosophical problems are really firstly linguistic
problems. The resurgence of the view that language plays a significant
role in the creation and circulation of concepts, and that the study of
philosophy is essentially the study of language, is associated with what
has been called the linguistic turn and philosophers such as Wittgenstein
in 20th-century philosophy. These debates about language in relation to
meaning and reference, cognition and consciousness remain active today.
Mental faculty, organ or instinct
One definition sees language primarily as the mental faculty
that allows humans to undertake linguistic behaviour: to learn
languages and to produce and understand utterances. This definition
stresses the universality of language to all humans, and it emphasizes
the biological basis for the human capacity for language as a unique
development of the human brain.
Proponents of the view that the drive to language acquisition is innate
in humans argue that this is supported by the fact that all cognitively
normal children raised in an environment where language is accessible
will acquire language without formal instruction. Languages may even
develop spontaneously in environments where people live or grow up
together without a common language; for example, creole languages and spontaneously developed sign languages such as Nicaraguan Sign Language. This view, which can be traced back to the philosophers Kant and Descartes, understands language to be largely innate, for example, in Chomsky’s theory of Universal Grammar, or American philosopher Jerry Fodor’s extreme innatist theory. These kinds of definitions are often applied in studies of language within a cognitive science framework and in neurolinguistics.[9][10]
Formal symbolic system
Another definition sees language as a formal system
of signs governed by grammatical rules of combination to communicate
meaning. This definition stresses that human languages can be described
as closed structural systems consisting of rules that relate particular signs to particular meanings. This structuralist view of language was first introduced by Ferdinand de Saussure,[12] and his structuralism remains foundational for many approaches to language.[13]
Some proponents of Saussure’s view of language have advocated a
formal approach which studies language structure by identifying its
basic elements and then by presenting a formal account of the rules
according to which the elements combine in order to form words and
sentences. The main proponent of such a theory is Noam Chomsky, the originator of the generative theory of grammar, who has defined language as the construction of sentences that can be generated using transformational grammars. Chomsky considers these rules to be an innate feature of the human mind and to constitute the rudiments of what language is.[15]
By way of contrast, such transformational grammars are also commonly
used to provide formal definitions of language are commonly used in formal logic, in formal theories of grammar, and in applied computational linguistics.[16][17]
In the philosophy of language, the view of linguistic meaning as
residing in the logical relations between propositions and reality was
developed by philosophers such as Alfred Tarski, Bertrand Russell, and other formal logicians.
Tool for communication
Yet another definition sees language as a system of communication
that enables humans to exchange verbal or symbolic utterances. This
definition stresses the social functions of language and the fact that
humans use it to express themselves and to manipulate objects in their
environment. Functional theories of grammar
explain grammatical structures by their communicative functions, and
understand the grammatical structures of language to be the result of an
adaptive process by which grammar was “tailored” to serve the
communicative needs of its users.[18][19]
This view of language is associated with the study of language in pragmatic, cognitive, and interactive frameworks, as well as in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology.
Functionalist theories tend to study grammar as dynamic phenomena, as
structures that are always in the process of changing as they are
employed by their speakers. This view places importance on the study of linguistic typology, or the classification of languages according to structural features, as it can be shown that processes of grammaticalization tend to follow trajectories that are partly dependent on typology.[17] In the philosophy of language, the view of pragmatics as being central to language and meaning is often associated with Wittgenstein’s later works and with ordinary language philosophers such as J. L. Austin, Paul Grice, John Searle, and W. O. Quine.
Unique status of human language
A number of features, many of which were described by Charles Hockett and called design features[21] set human language apart from other known systems of communication, such as those used by non-human animals.
Communication systems used by other animals such as bees or apes are closed systems that consist of a finite, usually very limited, number of possible ideas that can be expressed.[22] In contrast, human language is open-ended and productive,
meaning that it allows humans to produce a vast range of utterances
from a finite set of elements, and to create new words and sentences.
This is possible because human language is based on a dual code, in
which a finite number of elements which are meaningless in themselves
(e.g. sounds, letters or gestures) can be combined to form an infinite
number of larger units of meaning (words and sentences).[23]
However, one study has demonstrated that an Australian bird, the
chestnut-crowned babbler, is capable of using the same acoustic elements
in different arrangements to create two functionally distinct
vocalizations. [24]
Additionally, pied babblers have demonstrated the ability to generate
two functionally distinct vocalisations composed of the same sound type,
which can only be distinguished by the number of repeated elements. [25]
Several species of animals have proved to be able to acquire forms of communication through social learning: for instance a bonobo named Kanzi learned to express itself using a set of symbolic lexigrams.
Similarly, many species of birds and whales learn their songs by
imitating other members of their species. However, while some animals
may acquire large numbers of words and symbols,[note 1]
none have been able to learn as many different signs as are generally
known by an average 4 year old human, nor have any acquired anything
resembling the complex grammar of human language.[26]
Human languages also differ from animal communication systems in that they employ grammatical and semantic categories, such as noun and verb, present and past, which may be used to express exceedingly complex meanings.[26] Human language is also unique in having the property of recursivity:
for example, a noun phrase can contain another noun phrase (as in
“[[the chimpanzee]’s lips]”) or a clause can contain another clause (as
in “[I see [the dog is running]]”).[2] Human language is also the only known natural communication system whose adaptability may be referred to as modality independent.
This means that it can be used not only for communication through one
channel or medium, but through several. For example, spoken language
uses the auditive modality, whereas sign languages and writing use the visual modality, and braille writing uses the tactile modality.[27]
Human language is also unique in being able to refer to abstract
concepts and to imagined or hypothetical events as well as events that
took place in the past or may happen in the future. This ability to
refer to events that are not at the same time or place as the speech
event is called displacement, and while some animal communication systems can use displacement (such as the communication of bees
that can communicate the location of sources of nectar that are out of
sight), the degree to which it is used in human language is also
considered unique.[23]
Origin
Theories about the origin of language differ in regard to their basic
assumptions about what language is. Some theories are based on the idea
that language is so complex that one cannot imagine it simply appearing
from nothing in its final form, but that it must have evolved from
earlier pre-linguistic systems among our pre-human ancestors. These
theories can be called continuity-based theories. The opposite viewpoint
is that language is such a unique human trait that it cannot be
compared to anything found among non-humans and that it must therefore
have appeared suddenly in the transition from pre-hominids to early man.
These theories can be defined as discontinuity-based. Similarly,
theories based on Chomsky’s generative view of language see language
mostly as an innate faculty that is largely genetically encoded, whereas
functionalist theories see it as a system that is largely cultural,
learned through social interaction.[29]
One prominent proponent of a discontinuity-based theory of human language origins is linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky.[29]
Chomsky proposes that “some random mutation took place, maybe after
some strange cosmic ray shower, and it reorganized the brain, implanting
a language organ in an otherwise primate brain.”
Though cautioning against taking this story too literally, Chomsky
insists that “it may be closer to reality than many other fairy tales
that are told about evolutionary processes, including language.”
Continuity-based theories are held by a majority of scholars, but
they vary in how they envision this development. Those who see language
as being mostly innate, for example psychologist Steven Pinker, hold the precedents to be animal cognition,[10] whereas those who see language as a socially learned tool of communication, such as psychologist Michael Tomasello, see it as having developed from animal communication in primates: either gestural or vocal communication to assist in cooperation.[31] Other continuity-based models see language as having developed from music, a view already espoused by Rousseau, Herder, Humboldt, and Charles Darwin. A prominent proponent of this view is archaeologist Steven Mithen. Stephen Anderson states that the age of spoken languages is estimated at 60,000 to 100,000 years[33] and that:
Researchers on the evolutionary origin of language generally find it
plausible to suggest that language was invented only once, and that all
modern spoken languages are thus in some way related, even if that
relation can no longer be recovered … because of limitations on the
methods available for reconstruction.[34]
Because language emerged in the early prehistory
of man, before the existence of any written records, its early
development has left no historical traces, and it is believed that no
comparable processes can be observed today. Theories that stress
continuity often look at animals to see if, for example, primates
display any traits that can be seen as analogous to what pre-human
language must have been like. And early human fossils can be inspected
for traces of physical adaptation to language use or pre-linguistic
forms of symbolic behaviour. Among the signs in human fossils that may
suggest linguistic abilities are: the size of the brain relative to body
mass, the presence of a larynx capable of advanced sound production and the nature of tools and other manufactured artifacts.
It was mostly undisputed that pre-human australopithecines did not have communication systems significantly different from those found in great apes in general. However, a 2017 study on Ardipithecus ramidus challenges this belief.[36] Scholarly opinions vary as to the developments since the appearance of the genus Homo
some 2.5 million years ago. Some scholars assume the development of
primitive language-like systems (proto-language) as early as Homo habilis (2.3 million years ago) while others place the development of primitive symbolic communication only with Homo erectus (1.8 million years ago) or Homo heidelbergensis (0.6 million years ago), and the development of language proper with Anatomically Modern Homo sapiens with the Upper Paleolithic revolution less than 100,000 years ago.
Study
Noam Chomsky is one of the most important linguistic theorists of the 20th century.
The study of language, linguistics, has been developing into a science since the first grammatical descriptions of particular languages in India more than 2000 years ago, after the development of the Brahmi script.
Modern linguistics is a science that concerns itself with all aspects
of language, examining it from all of the theoretical viewpoints
described above.[39]
Subdisciplines
The academic study of language is conducted within many different
disciplinary areas and from different theoretical angles, all of which
inform modern approaches to linguistics. For example, descriptive linguistics examines the grammar of single languages, theoretical linguistics
develops theories on how best to conceptualize and define the nature of
language based on data from the various extant human languages, sociolinguistics
studies how languages are used for social purposes informing in turn
the study of the social functions of language and grammatical
description, neurolinguistics studies how language is processed in the human brain and allows the experimental testing of theories, computational linguistics
builds on theoretical and descriptive linguistics to construct
computational models of language often aimed at processing natural
language or at testing linguistic hypotheses, and historical linguistics
relies on grammatical and lexical descriptions of languages to trace
their individual histories and reconstruct trees of language families by
using the comparative method.[40]
Early history
The formal study of language is often considered to have started in India with Pāṇini, the 5th century BC grammarian who formulated 3,959 rules of Sanskrit morphology. However, Sumerian scribes already studied the differences between Sumerian and Akkadian grammar around 1900 BC. Subsequent grammatical traditions developed in all of the ancient cultures that adopted writing.[41]
In the 17th century AD, the French Port-Royal Grammarians
developed the idea that the grammars of all languages were a reflection
of the universal basics of thought, and therefore that grammar was
universal. In the 18th century, the first use of the comparative method by British philologist and expert on ancient India William Jones sparked the rise of comparative linguistics.[42] The scientific study of language was broadened from Indo-European to language in general by Wilhelm von Humboldt. Early in the 20th century, Ferdinand de Saussure introduced the idea of language as a static system of interconnected units, defined through the oppositions between them.[12]
By introducing a distinction between diachronic and synchronic
analyses of language, he laid the foundation of the modern discipline
of linguistics. Saussure also introduced several basic dimensions of
linguistic analysis that are still fundamental in many contemporary
linguistic theories, such as the distinctions between syntagm and paradigm, and the Langue-parole distinction, distinguishing language as an abstract system (langue), from language as a concrete manifestation of this system (parole).[43]
Contemporary linguistics
In the 1960s, Noam Chomsky formulated the generative theory of language.
According to this theory, the most basic form of language is a set of
syntactic rules that is universal for all humans and which underlies the
grammars of all human languages. This set of rules is called Universal Grammar;
for Chomsky, describing it is the primary objective of the discipline
of linguistics. Thus, he considered that the grammars of individual
languages are only of importance to linguistics insofar as they allow us
to deduce the universal underlying rules from which the observable
linguistic variability is generated.[44]
In opposition to the formal theories of the generative school, functional theories of language
propose that since language is fundamentally a tool, its structures are
best analyzed and understood by reference to their functions. Formal theories of grammar
seek to define the different elements of language and describe the way
they relate to each other as systems of formal rules or operations,
while functional theories seek to define the functions performed by
language and then relate them to the linguistic elements that carry them
out.[17][note 2] The framework of cognitive linguistics
interprets language in terms of the concepts (which are sometimes
universal, and sometimes specific to a particular language) which
underlie its forms. Cognitive linguistics is primarily concerned with
how the mind creates meaning through language.[45]
Physiological and neural architecture of language and speech
Speaking is the default modality for language in all cultures. The
production of spoken language depends on sophisticated capacities for
controlling the lips, tongue and other components of the vocal
apparatus, the ability to acoustically decode speech sounds, and the
neurological apparatus required for acquiring and producing language.[46] The study of the genetic bases for human language is at an early stage: the only gene that has definitely been implicated in language production is FOXP2, which may cause a kind of congenital language disorder if affected by mutations.[47]
The brain
The brain is the coordinating center of all linguistic activity; it
controls both the production of linguistic cognition and of meaning and
the mechanics of speech production. Nonetheless, our knowledge of the
neurological bases for language is quite limited, though it has advanced
considerably with the use of modern imaging techniques. The discipline
of linguistics dedicated to studying the neurological aspects of
language is called neurolinguistics.[48]
Early work in neurolinguistics involved the study of language in
people with brain lesions, to see how lesions in specific areas affect
language and speech. In this way, neuroscientists in the 19th century
discovered that two areas in the brain are crucially implicated in
language processing. The first area is Wernicke’s area, which is located in the posterior section of the superior temporal gyrus in the dominant cerebral hemisphere. People with a lesion in this area of the brain develop receptive aphasia,
a condition in which there is a major impairment of language
comprehension, while speech retains a natural-sounding rhythm and a
relatively normal sentence structure. The second area is Broca’s area, located in the posterior inferior frontal gyrus of the dominant hemisphere. People with a lesion to this area develop expressive aphasia, meaning that they know what they want to say, they just cannot get it out.[49]
They are typically able to understand what is being said to them, but
unable to speak fluently. Other symptoms that may be present in
expressive aphasia include problems with fluency, articulation,
word-finding, word repetition,
and producing and comprehending complex grammatical sentences, both
orally and in writing. Those with this aphasia also exhibit
ungrammatical speech and show inability to use syntactic information to
determine the meaning of sentences. Both expressive and receptive
aphasia also affect the use of sign language, in analogous ways to how
they affect speech, with expressive aphasia causing signers to sign
slowly and with incorrect grammar, whereas a signer with receptive
aphasia will sign fluently, but make little sense to others and have
difficulties comprehending others’ signs. This shows that the impairment
is specific to the ability to use language, not to the physiology used
for speech production.[50][51]
With technological advances in the late 20th century, neurolinguists have also incorporated non-invasive techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electrophysiology to study language processing in individuals without impairments.[48]
Anatomy of speech
Spectrogram of American English vowels [i, u, ɑ] showing the formants f1 and f2
Real time MRI scan of a person speaking in Mandarin Chinese
Spoken language relies on human physical ability to produce sound, which is a longitudinal wave propagated through the air at a frequency capable of vibrating the ear drum. This ability depends on the physiology of the human speech organs. These organs consist of the lungs, the voice box (larynx),
and the upper vocal tract – the throat, the mouth, and the nose. By
controlling the different parts of the speech apparatus, the airstream
can be manipulated to produce different speech sounds.[52]
The sound of speech can be analyzed into a combination of segmental and suprasegmental
elements. The segmental elements are those that follow each other in
sequences, which are usually represented by distinct letters in
alphabetic scripts, such as the Roman script. In free flowing speech,
there are no clear boundaries between one segment and the next, nor
usually are there any audible pauses between words. Segments therefore
are distinguished by their distinct sounds which are a result of their
different articulations, and they can be either vowels or consonants.
Suprasegmental phenomena encompass such elements as stress, phonation type, voice timbre, and prosody or intonation, all of which may have effects across multiple segments.[53]
Consonants and vowel segments combine to form syllables, which in turn combine to form utterances; these can be distinguished phonetically as the space between two inhalations. Acoustically, these different segments are characterized by different formant structures, that are visible in a spectrogram
of the recorded sound wave (See illustration of Spectrogram of the
formant structures of three English vowels). Formants are the amplitude
peaks in the frequency spectrum of a specific sound.[53][54]
Vowels are those sounds that have no audible friction caused by the
narrowing or obstruction of some part of the upper vocal tract. They
vary in quality according to the degree of lip aperture and the
placement of the tongue within the oral cavity.[53] Vowels are called close when the lips are relatively closed, as in the pronunciation of the vowel [i] (English “ee”), or open when the lips are relatively open, as in the vowel [a] (English “ah”). If the tongue is located towards the back of the mouth, the quality changes, creating vowels such as [u] (English “oo”). The quality also changes depending on whether the lips are rounded as opposed to unrounded, creating distinctions such as that between [i] (unrounded front vowel such as English “ee”) and [y] (rounded front vowel such as German “ü”).[55]
Consonants are those sounds that have audible friction or closure at
some point within the upper vocal tract. Consonant sounds vary by place
of articulation, i.e. the place in the vocal tract where the airflow is
obstructed, commonly at the lips, teeth, alveolar ridge, palate, velum, uvula, or glottis. Each place of articulation produces a different set of consonant sounds, which are further distinguished by manner of articulation, or the kind of friction, whether full closure, in which case the consonant is called occlusive or stop, or different degrees of aperture creating fricatives and approximants. Consonants can also be either voiced or unvoiced,
depending on whether the vocal cords are set in vibration by airflow
during the production of the sound. Voicing is what separates English [s] in bus (unvoiced sibilant) from [z] in buzz (voiced sibilant).[56]
Some speech sounds, both vowels and consonants, involve release of air flow through the nasal cavity, and these are called nasals or nasalized sounds. Other sounds are defined by the way the tongue moves within the mouth: such as the l-sounds (called laterals, because the air flows along both sides of the tongue), and the r-sounds (called rhotics) that are characterized by how the tongue is positioned relative to the air stream.[54]
By using these speech organs, humans can produce hundreds of distinct
sounds: some appear very often in the world’s languages, whereas others
are much more common in certain language families, language areas, or
even specific to a single language.[57]
Structure
When described as a system of symbolic communication, language is traditionally seen as consisting of three parts: signs, meanings, and a code connecting signs with their meanings. The study of the process of semiosis, how signs and meanings are combined, used, and interpreted is called semiotics.
Signs can be composed of sounds, gestures, letters, or symbols,
depending on whether the language is spoken, signed, or written, and
they can be combined into complex signs, such as words and phrases. When
used in communication, a sign is encoded and transmitted by a sender
through a channel to a receiver who decodes it.[58]
Some of the properties that define human language as opposed to other
communication systems are: the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign,
meaning that there is no predictable connection between a linguistic
sign and its meaning; the duality of the linguistic system, meaning that
linguistic structures are built by combining elements into larger
structures that can be seen as layered, e.g. how sounds build words and
words build phrases; the discreteness of the elements of language,
meaning that the elements out of which linguistic signs are constructed
are discrete units, e.g. sounds and words, that can be distinguished
from each other and rearranged in different patterns; and the
productivity of the linguistic system, meaning that the finite number of
linguistic elements can be combined into a theoretically infinite
number of combinations.[58]
The rules by which signs can be combined to form words and phrases are called syntax or grammar. The meaning that is connected to individual signs, morphemes, words, phrases, and texts is called semantics.[59]
The division of language into separate but connected systems of sign
and meaning goes back to the first linguistic studies of de Saussure and
is now used in almost all branches of linguistics.[60]
Semantics
Languages express meaning by relating a sign form to a meaning, or
its content. Sign forms must be something that can be perceived, for
example, in sounds, images, or gestures, and then related to a specific
meaning by social convention. Because the basic relation of meaning for
most linguistic signs is based on social convention, linguistic signs
can be considered arbitrary, in the sense that the convention is
established socially and historically, rather than by means of a natural
relation between a specific sign form and its meaning.
Thus, languages must have a vocabulary of signs related to specific meaning. The English sign “dog” denotes, for example, a member of the species Canis familiaris. In a language, the array of arbitrary signs connected to specific meanings is called the lexicon, and a single sign connected to a meaning is called a lexeme.
Not all meanings in a language are represented by single words. Often,
semantic concepts are embedded in the morphology or syntax of the
language in the form of grammatical categories.[61]
All languages contain the semantic structure of predication:
a structure that predicates a property, state, or action.
Traditionally, semantics has been understood to be the study of how
speakers and interpreters assign truth values
to statements, so that meaning is understood to be the process by which
a predicate can be said to be true or false about an entity, e.g. “[x
[is y]]” or “[x [does y]]”. Recently, this model of semantics has been
complemented with more dynamic models of meaning that incorporate shared
knowledge about the context in which a sign is interpreted into the
production of meaning. Such models of meaning are explored in the field
of pragmatics.[61]
Sounds and symbols
A spectrogram showing the sound of the spoken English word “man”, which is written phonetically as [mæn].
Note that in flowing speech, there is no clear division between
segments, only a smooth transition as the vocal apparatus moves.
The syllable “wi” in the Hangul script
Depending on modality, language structure can be based on systems of
sounds (speech), gestures (sign languages), or graphic or tactile
symbols (writing). The ways in which languages use sounds or signs to
construct meaning are studied in phonology.[62] The study of how humans produce and perceive vocal sounds is called phonetics.[63]
In spoken language, meaning is produced when sounds become part of a
system in which some sounds can contribute to expressing meaning and
others do not. In any given language, only a limited number of the many
distinct sounds that can be created by the human vocal apparatus
contribute to constructing meaning.[57]
Sounds as part of a linguistic system are called phonemes.[64]
Phonemes are abstract units of sound, defined as the smallest units in a
language that can serve to distinguish between the meaning of a pair of
minimally different words, a so-called minimal pair. In English, for example, the words bat [bæt] and pat [pʰæt] form a minimal pair, in which the distinction between /b/ and /p/
differentiates the two words, which have different meanings. However,
each language contrasts sounds in different ways. For example, in a
language that does not distinguish between voiced and unvoiced
consonants, the sounds [p] and [b]
(if they both occur) could be considered a single phoneme, and
consequently, the two pronunciations would have the same meaning.
Similarly, the English language does not distinguish phonemically
between aspirated and non-aspirated pronunciations of consonants, as many other languages like Korean and Hindi do: the unaspirated /p/ in spin [spɪn] and the aspirated /p/ in pin [pʰɪn] are considered to be merely different ways of pronouncing the same phoneme (such variants of a single phoneme are called allophones), whereas in Mandarin Chinese, the same difference in pronunciation distinguishes between the words [pʰá] ‘crouch’ and [pá] ‘eight’ (the accent above the á means that the vowel is pronounced with a high tone).[65]
All spoken languages have phonemes of at least two different categories, vowels and consonants, that can be combined to form syllables.[53]
As well as segments such as consonants and vowels, some languages also
use sound in other ways to convey meaning. Many languages, for example,
use stress, pitch, duration, and tone to distinguish meaning. Because these phenomena operate outside of the level of single segments, they are called suprasegmental.[66] Some languages have only a few phonemes, for example, Rotokas and Pirahã language with 11 and 10 phonemes respectively, whereas languages like Taa may have as many as 141 phonemes.[65] In sign languages, the equivalent to phonemes (formerly called cheremes)
are defined by the basic elements of gestures, such as hand shape,
orientation, location, and motion, which correspond to manners of
articulation in spoken language.[67][68][69]
Writing systems represent language using visual symbols, which may or may not correspond to the sounds of spoken language. The Latin alphabet
(and those on which it is based or that have been derived from it) was
originally based on the representation of single sounds, so that words
were constructed from letters that generally denote a single consonant
or vowel in the structure of the word. In syllabic scripts, such as the Inuktitut syllabary, each sign represents a whole syllable. In logographic scripts, each sign represents an entire word,[70] and will generally bear no relation to the sound of that word in spoken language.
Because all languages have a very large number of words, no purely
logographic scripts are known to exist. Written language represents the
way spoken sounds and words follow one after another by arranging
symbols according to a pattern that follows a certain direction. The
direction used in a writing system is entirely arbitrary and established
by convention. Some writing systems use the horizontal axis (left to
right as the Latin script or right to left as the Arabic script),
while others such as traditional Chinese writing use the vertical
dimension (from top to bottom). A few writing systems use opposite
directions for alternating lines, and others, such as the ancient Maya
script, can be written in either direction and rely on graphic cues to
show the reader the direction of reading.[71]
In order to represent the sounds of the world’s languages in writing, linguists have developed the International Phonetic Alphabet, designed to represent all of the discrete sounds that are known to contribute to meaning in human languages.[72]
Grammar
Grammar is the study of how meaningful elements called morphemes within a language can be combined into utterances. Morphemes can either be free or bound. If they are free to be moved around within an utterance, they are usually called words, and if they are bound to other words or morphemes, they are called affixes.
The way in which meaningful elements can be combined within a language
is governed by rules. The rules for the internal structure of words are
called morphology. The rules of the internal structure of phrases and sentences are called syntax.[73]
Grammatical categories
Grammar can be described as a system of categories and a set of rules
that determine how categories combine to form different aspects of
meaning.[74]
Languages differ widely in whether they are encoded through the use of
categories or lexical units. However, several categories are so common
as to be nearly universal. Such universal categories include the
encoding of the grammatical relations of participants and predicates by
grammatically distinguishing between their relations to a predicate, the encoding of temporal and spatial relations on predicates, and a system of grammatical person governing reference to and distinction between speakers and addressees and those about whom they are speaking.[75]
Word classes
Languages organize their parts of speech
into classes according to their functions and positions relative to
other parts. All languages, for instance, make a basic distinction
between a group of words that prototypically denotes things and concepts
and a group of words that prototypically denotes actions and events.
The first group, which includes English words such as “dog” and “song”,
are usually called nouns. The second, which includes “run” and “sing”, are called verbs. Another common category is the adjective:
words that describe properties or qualities of nouns, such as “red” or
“big”. Word classes can be “open” if new words can continuously be added
to the class, or relatively “closed” if there is a fixed number of
words in a class. In English, the class of pronouns is closed, whereas
the class of adjectives is open, since an infinite number of adjectives
can be constructed from verbs (e.g. “saddened”) or nouns (e.g. with the
-like suffix, as in “noun-like”). In other languages such as Korean, the situation is the opposite, and new pronouns can be constructed, whereas the number of adjectives is fixed.[76]
Word classes also carry out differing functions in grammar. Prototypically, verbs are used to construct predicates, while nouns are used as arguments
of predicates. In a sentence such as “Sally runs”, the predicate is
“runs”, because it is the word that predicates a specific state about
its argument “Sally”. Some verbs such as “curse” can take two arguments,
e.g. “Sally cursed John”. A predicate that can only take a single
argument is called intransitive, while a predicate that can take two arguments is called transitive.[77]
Many other word classes exist in different languages, such as conjunctions like “and” that serve to join two sentences, articles that introduce a noun, interjections such as “wow!”, or ideophones
like “splash” that mimic the sound of some event. Some languages have
positionals that describe the spatial position of an event or entity.
Many languages have classifiers that identify countable nouns as belonging to a particular type or having a particular shape. For instance, in Japanese, the general noun classifier for humans is nin (人), and it is used for counting humans, whatever they are called:[78]
- san-nin no gakusei (三人の学生) lit. “3 human-classifier of student” — three students
For trees, it would be:
- san-bon no ki (三本の木) lit. “3 classifier-for-long-objects of tree” — three trees
Morphology
In linguistics, the study of the internal structure of complex words and the processes by which words are formed is called morphology. In most languages, it is possible to construct complex words that are built of several morphemes.
For instance, the English word “unexpected” can be analyzed as being
composed of the three morphemes “un-”, “expect” and “-ed”.[79]
Morphemes can be classified according to whether they are independent morphemes, so-called roots, or whether they can only co-occur attached to other morphemes. These bound morphemes or affixes can be classified according to their position in relation to the root: prefixes precede the root, suffixes follow the root, and infixes
are inserted in the middle of a root. Affixes serve to modify or
elaborate the meaning of the root. Some languages change the meaning of
words by changing the phonological structure of a word, for example, the
English word “run”, which in the past tense is “ran”. This process is
called ablaut. Furthermore, morphology distinguishes between the process of inflection, which modifies or elaborates on a word, and the process of derivation,
which creates a new word from an existing one. In English, the verb
“sing” has the inflectional forms “singing” and “sung”, which are both
verbs, and the derivational form “singer”, which is a noun derived from
the verb with the agentive suffix “-er”.[80]
Languages differ widely in how much they rely on morphological
processes of word formation. In some languages, for example, Chinese,
there are no morphological processes, and all grammatical information is
encoded syntactically by forming strings of single words. This type of
morpho-syntax is often called isolating,
or analytic, because there is almost a full correspondence between a
single word and a single aspect of meaning. Most languages have words
consisting of several morphemes, but they vary in the degree to which
morphemes are discrete units. In many languages, notably in most
Indo-European languages, single morphemes may have several distinct
meanings that cannot be analyzed into smaller segments. For example, in
Latin, the word bonus, or “good”, consists of the root bon-, meaning “good”, and the suffix -us, which indicates masculine gender, singular number, and nominative case. These languages are called fusional languages, because several meanings may be fused into a single morpheme. The opposite of fusional languages are agglutinative languages
which construct words by stringing morphemes together in chains, but
with each morpheme as a discrete semantic unit. An example of such a
language is Turkish, where for example, the word evlerinizden, or “from your houses”, consists of the morphemes, ev-ler-iniz-den with the meanings house-plural-your-from. The languages that rely on morphology to the greatest extent are traditionally called polysynthetic languages. They may express the equivalent of an entire English sentence in a single word. For example, in Persian the single word nafahmidamesh means I didn’t understand it consisting of morphemes na-fahm-id-am-esh with the meanings, “negation.understand.past.I.it”. As another example with more complexity, in the Yupik word tuntussuqatarniksatengqiggtuq, which means “He had not yet said again that he was going to hunt reindeer”, the word consists of the morphemes tuntu-ssur-qatar-ni-ksaite-ngqiggte-uq with the meanings, “reindeer-hunt-future-say-negation-again-third.person.singular.indicative”, and except for the morpheme tuntu (”reindeer”) none of the other morphemes can appear in isolation.[81]
Many languages use morphology to cross-reference words within a sentence. This is sometimes called agreement.
For example, in many Indo-European languages, adjectives must
cross-reference the noun they modify in terms of number, case, and
gender, so that the Latin adjective bonus, or “good”, is
inflected to agree with a noun that is masculine gender, singular
number, and nominative case. In many polysynthetic languages, verbs
cross-reference their subjects and objects. In these types of languages,
a single verb may include information that would require an entire
sentence in English. For example, in the Basque phrase ikusi nauzu, or “you saw me”, the past tense auxiliary verb n-au-zu (similar to English “do”) agrees with both the subject (you) expressed by the n- prefix, and with the object (me) expressed by the – zu suffix. The sentence could be directly transliterated as “see you-did-me”[82]
Syntax
In addition to word classes, a sentence can be analyzed in terms of grammatical functions: “The cat” is the subject of the phrase, “on the mat” is a locative phrase, and “sat” is the core of the predicate.
Another way in which languages convey meaning is through the order of
words within a sentence. The grammatical rules for how to produce new
sentences from words that are already known is called syntax. The
syntactical rules of a language determine why a sentence in English such
as “I love you” is meaningful, but “*love you I” is not.[note 3]
Syntactical rules determine how word order and sentence structure is
constrained, and how those constraints contribute to meaning.[83]
For example, in English, the two sentences “the slaves were cursing the
master” and “the master was cursing the slaves” mean different things,
because the role of the grammatical subject is encoded by the noun being
in front of the verb, and the role of object is encoded by the noun
appearing after the verb. Conversely, in Latin, both Dominus servos vituperabat and Servos vituperabat dominus mean “the master was reprimanding the slaves”, because servos, or “slaves”, is in the accusative case, showing that they are the grammatical object of the sentence, and dominus, or “master”, is in the nominative case, showing that he is the subject.[84]
Latin uses morphology to express the distinction between subject and
object, whereas English uses word order. Another example of how
syntactic rules contribute to meaning is the rule of inverse word order in questions,
which exists in many languages. This rule explains why when in English,
the phrase “John is talking to Lucy” is turned into a question, it
becomes “Who is John talking to?”, and not “John is talking to who?”.
The latter example may be used as a way of placing special emphasis
on “who”, thereby slightly altering the meaning of the question. Syntax
also includes the rules for how complex sentences are structured by
grouping words together in units, called phrases,
that can occupy different places in a larger syntactic structure.
Sentences can be described as consisting of phrases connected in a tree
structure, connecting the phrases to each other at different levels.
To the right is a graphic representation of the syntactic analysis of
the English sentence “the cat sat on the mat”. The sentence is analyzed
as being constituted by a noun phrase, a verb, and a prepositional
phrase; the prepositional phrase is further divided into a preposition
and a noun phrase, and the noun phrases consist of an article and a
noun.[86]
The reason sentences can be seen as being composed of phrases is
because each phrase would be moved around as a single element if
syntactic operations were carried out. For example, “the cat” is one
phrase, and “on the mat” is another, because they would be treated as
single units if a decision was made to emphasize the location by moving
forward the prepositional phrase: “[And] on the mat, the cat sat”.[86]
There are many different formalist and functionalist frameworks that
propose theories for describing syntactic structures, based on different
assumptions about what language is and how it should be described. Each
of them would analyze a sentence such as this in a different manner.[17]
Typology and universals
Languages can be classified in relation to their grammatical types.
Languages that belong to different families nonetheless often have
features in common, and these shared features tend to correlate.[87] For example, languages can be classified on the basis of their basic word order, the relative order of the verb, and its constituents in a normal indicative sentence. In English, the basic order is SVO: “The snake(S) bit(V) the man(O)”, whereas for example, the corresponding sentence in the Australian language Gamilaraay would be d̪uyugu n̪ama d̪ayn yiːy (snake man bit), SOV.[88]
Word order type is relevant as a typological parameter, because basic
word order type corresponds with other syntactic parameters, such as the
relative order of nouns and adjectives, or of the use of prepositions or postpositions. Such correlations are called implicational universals.[89] For example, most (but not all) languages that are of the SOV type have postpositions rather than prepositions, and have adjectives before nouns.[90]
All languages structure sentences into Subject, Verb, and Object, but
languages differ in the way they classify the relations between actors
and actions. English uses the nominative-accusative
word typology: in English transitive clauses, the subjects of both
intransitive sentences (”I run”) and transitive sentences (”I love you”)
are treated in the same way, shown here by the nominative pronoun I. Some languages, called ergative,
Gamilaraay among them, distinguish instead between Agents and Patients.
In ergative languages, the single participant in an intransitive
sentence, such as “I run”, is treated the same as the patient in a
transitive sentence, giving the equivalent of “me run”. Only in
transitive sentences would the equivalent of the pronoun “I” be used.[88]
In this way the semantic roles can map onto the grammatical relations
in different ways, grouping an intransitive subject either with Agents
(accusative type) or Patients (ergative type) or even making each of the
three roles differently, which is called the tripartite type.[91]
The shared features of languages which belong to the same typological
class type may have arisen completely independently. Their
co-occurrence might be due to universal laws governing the structure of
natural languages, “language universals”, or they might be the result of
languages evolving convergent solutions to the recurring communicative
problems that humans use language to solve.[18]
Social contexts of use and transmission
While humans have the ability to learn any language, they only do so
if they grow up in an environment in which language exists and is used
by others. Language is therefore dependent on communities of speakers in which children learn language
from their elders and peers and themselves transmit language to their
own children. Languages are used by those who speak them to communicate and to solve a plethora of social tasks. Many aspects of language use can be seen to be adapted specifically to these purposes.[18]
Due to the way in which language is transmitted between generations and
within communities, language perpetually changes, diversifying into new
languages or converging due to language contact. The process is similar to the process of evolution, where the process of descent with modification leads to the formation of a phylogenetic tree.[93]
However, languages differ from biological organisms in that they
readily incorporate elements from other languages through the process of
diffusion, as speakers of different languages come into contact. Humans also frequently speak more than one language, acquiring their first language
or languages as children, or learning new languages as they grow up.
Because of the increased language contact in the globalizing world, many
small languages are becoming endangered
as their speakers shift to other languages that afford the possibility
to participate in larger and more influential speech communities.[94]
Usage and meaning
The semantic study of meaning assumes that meaning is located in a
relation between signs and meanings that are firmly established through
social convention. However, semantics does not study the way in which
social conventions are made and affect language. Rather, when studying
the way in which words and signs are used, it is often the case that
words have different meanings, depending on the social context of use.
An important example of this is the process called deixis,
which describes the way in which certain words refer to entities
through their relation between a specific point in time and space when
the word is uttered. Such words are, for example, the word, “I” (which
designates the person speaking), “now” (which designates the moment of
speaking), and “here” (which designates the position of speaking). Signs
also change their meanings over time, as the conventions governing
their usage gradually change. The study of how the meaning of linguistic
expressions changes depending on context is called pragmatics. Deixis
is an important part of the way that we use language to point out
entities in the world.[95]
Pragmatics is concerned with the ways in which language use is
patterned and how these patterns contribute to meaning. For example, in
all languages, linguistic expressions can be used not just to transmit
information, but to perform actions. Certain actions are made only
through language, but nonetheless have tangible effects, e.g. the act of
“naming”, which creates a new name for some entity, or the act of
“pronouncing someone man and wife”, which creates a social contract of
marriage. These types of acts are called speech acts, although they can also be carried out through writing or hand signing.[96]
The form of linguistic expression often does not correspond to the
meaning that it actually has in a social context. For example, if at a
dinner table a person asks, “Can you reach the salt?”, that is, in fact,
not a question about the length of the arms of the one being addressed,
but a request to pass the salt across the table. This meaning is
implied by the context in which it is spoken; these kinds of effects of
meaning are called conversational implicatures.
These social rules for which ways of using language are considered
appropriate in certain situations and how utterances are to be
understood in relation to their context vary between communities, and
learning them is a large part of acquiring communicative competence in a language.[97]
Acquisition
All healthy, normally developing
human beings learn to use language. Children acquire the language or
languages used around them: whichever languages they receive sufficient
exposure to during childhood. The development is essentially the same
for children acquiring sign or oral languages.[98]
This learning process is referred to as first-language acquisition,
since unlike many other kinds of learning, it requires no direct
teaching or specialized study. In The Descent of Man, naturalist Charles Darwin called this process “an instinctive tendency to acquire an art”.[10]
First language acquisition proceeds in a fairly regular sequence,
though there is a wide degree of variation in the timing of particular
stages among normally developing infants. From birth, newborns respond
more readily to human speech than to other sounds. Around one month of
age, babies appear to be able to distinguish between different speech sounds. Around six months of age, a child will begin babbling, producing the speech sounds or handshapes of the languages used around them. Words appear around the age of 12 to 18 months; the average vocabulary of an eighteen-month-old child is around 50 words. A child’s first utterances are holophrases
(literally “whole-sentences”), utterances that use just one word to
communicate some idea. Several months after a child begins producing
words, he or she will produce two-word utterances, and within a few more
months will begin to produce telegraphic speech, or short sentences that are less grammatically
complex than adult speech, but that do show regular syntactic
structure. From roughly the age of three to five years, a child’s
ability to speak or sign is refined to the point that it resembles adult
language.[99][100] Studies published in 2013 have indicated that unborn fetuses are capable of language acquisition to some degree.[101][102]
Acquisition of second and additional languages can come at any age,
through exposure in daily life or courses. Children learning a second
language are more likely to achieve native-like fluency than adults, but
in general, it is very rare for someone speaking a second language to
pass completely for a native speaker. An important difference between
first language acquisition and additional language acquisition is that
the process of additional language acquisition is influenced by
languages that the learner already knows.[103]
Culture
Languages, understood as the particular set of speech norms of a
particular community, are also a part of the larger culture of the
community that speaks them. Languages differ not only in pronunciation,
vocabulary, and grammar, but also through having different “cultures of
speaking.” Humans use language as a way of signalling identity with one
cultural group as well as difference from others. Even among speakers of
one language, several different ways of using the language exist, and
each is used to signal affiliation with particular subgroups within a
larger culture. Linguists and anthropologists, particularly sociolinguists, ethnolinguists, and linguistic anthropologists have specialized in studying how ways of speaking vary between speech communities.[104]
Linguists use the term “varieties” to refer to the different ways of speaking a language. This term includes geographically or socioculturally defined dialects as well as the jargons or styles of subcultures.
Linguistic anthropologists and sociologists of language define
communicative style as the ways that language is used and understood
within a particular culture.[105]
Because norms for language use are shared by members of a specific
group, communicative style also becomes a way of displaying and
constructing group identity. Linguistic differences may become salient
markers of divisions between social groups, for example, speaking a
language with a particular accent may imply membership of an ethnic
minority or social class, one’s area of origin, or status as a second
language speaker. These kinds of differences are not part of the
linguistic system, but are an important part of how people use language
as a social tool for constructing groups.[106]
However, many languages also have grammatical conventions that signal
the social position of the speaker in relation to others through the
use of registers that are related to social hierarchies or divisions. In
many languages, there are stylistic or even grammatical differences
between the ways men and women speak, between age groups, or between social classes, just as some languages employ different words depending on who is listening. For example, in the Australian language Dyirbal, a married man must use a special set of words to refer to everyday items when speaking in the presence of his mother-in-law.[107] Some cultures, for example, have elaborate systems of “social deixis“, or systems of signalling social distance through linguistic means.[108]
In English, social deixis is shown mostly through distinguishing
between addressing some people by first name and others by surname, and
in titles such as “Mrs.”, “boy”, “Doctor”, or “Your Honor”, but in other
languages, such systems may be highly complex and codified in the
entire grammar and vocabulary of the language. For instance, in
languages of east Asia such as Thai, Burmese, and Javanese,
different words are used according to whether a speaker is addressing
someone of higher or lower rank than oneself in a ranking system with
animals and children ranking the lowest and gods and members of royalty
as the highest.[108]
Writing, literacy and technology
Throughout history a number of different ways of representing language in graphic media have been invented. These are called writing systems.
The use of writing has made language even more useful to humans. It
makes it possible to store large amounts of information outside of the
human body and retrieve it again, and it allows communication across
distances that would otherwise be impossible. Many languages
conventionally employ different genres, styles, and registers in written
and spoken language, and in some communities, writing traditionally
takes place in an entirely different language than the one spoken. There
is some evidence that the use of writing also has effects on the
cognitive development of humans, perhaps because acquiring literacy
generally requires explicit and formal education.[109]
The invention of the first writing systems is roughly contemporary with the beginning of the Bronze Age in the late 4th millennium BC. The Sumerian archaic cuneiform script and the Egyptian hieroglyphs
are generally considered to be the earliest writing systems, both
emerging out of their ancestral proto-literate symbol systems from
3400–3200 BC with the earliest coherent texts from about 2600 BC.
It is generally agreed that Sumerian writing was an independent
invention; however, it is debated whether Egyptian writing was developed
completely independently of Sumerian, or was a case of cultural diffusion. A similar debate exists for the Chinese script, which developed around 1200 BC. The pre-Columbian Mesoamerican writing systems (including among others Olmec and Maya scripts) are generally believed to have had independent origins.[71]
Change
The first page of the poem Beowulf, written in Old English
in the early medieval period (800–1100 AD). Although Old English is the
direct ancestor of modern English, it is unintelligible to contemporary
English speakers.
All languages change as speakers adopt or invent new ways of speaking
and pass them on to other members of their speech community. Language
change happens at all levels from the phonological level to the levels
of vocabulary, morphology, syntax, and discourse. Even though language
change is often initially evaluated negatively by speakers of the
language who often consider changes to be “decay” or a sign of slipping
norms of language usage, it is natural and inevitable.[110]
Changes may affect specific sounds or the entire phonological system. Sound change can consist of the replacement of one speech sound or phonetic feature
by another, the complete loss of the affected sound, or even the
introduction of a new sound in a place where there had been none. Sound
changes can be conditioned in which case a sound is changed only
if it occurs in the vicinity of certain other sounds. Sound change is
usually assumed to be regular, which means that it is expected to
apply mechanically whenever its structural conditions are met,
irrespective of any non-phonological factors. On the other hand, sound
changes can sometimes be sporadic, affecting only one particular word or a few words, without any seeming regularity. Sometimes a simple change triggers a chain shift in which the entire phonological system is affected. This happened in the Germanic languages when the sound change known as Grimm’s law affected all the stop consonants in the system. The original consonant *bʰ became /b/ in the Germanic languages, the previous *b in turn became /p/, and the previous *p became /f/. The same process applied to all stop consonants and explains why Italic languages such as Latin have p in words like pater and pisces, whereas Germanic languages, like English, have father and fish.[111]
Another example is the Great Vowel Shift
in English, which is the reason that the spelling of English vowels do
not correspond well to their current pronunciation. This is because the
vowel shift brought the already established orthography out of
synchronization with pronunciation. Another source of sound change is
the erosion of words as pronunciation gradually becomes increasingly
indistinct and shortens words, leaving out syllables or sounds. This
kind of change caused Latin mea domina to eventually become the French madame and American English ma’am.[112]
Change also happens in the grammar of languages as discourse patterns such as idioms or particular constructions become grammaticalized.
This frequently happens when words or morphemes erode and the
grammatical system is unconsciously rearranged to compensate for the
lost element. For example, in some varieties of Caribbean Spanish the final /s/ has eroded away. Since Standard Spanish uses final /s/ in the morpheme marking the second person subject “you” in verbs, the Caribbean varieties now have to express the second person using the pronoun tú. This means that the sentence “what’s your name” is ¿como te llamas? [ˈkomo te ˈjamas] in Standard Spanish, but [ˈkomo ˈtu te ˈjama] in Caribbean Spanish. The simple sound change has affected both morphology and syntax.[113]
Another common cause of grammatical change is the gradual petrification
of idioms into new grammatical forms, for example, the way the English
“going to” construction lost its aspect of movement and in some
varieties of English has almost become a full-fledged future tense (e.g.
I’m gonna).
Language change may be motivated by “language internal” factors, such
as changes in pronunciation motivated by certain sounds being difficult
to distinguish aurally or to produce, or through patterns of change
that cause some rare types of constructions to drift towards more common types.[114]
Other causes of language change are social, such as when certain
pronunciations become emblematic of membership in certain groups, such
as social classes, or with ideologies,
and therefore are adopted by those who wish to identify with those
groups or ideas. In this way, issues of identity and politics can have
profound effects on language structure.[115]
Contact
One important source of language change is contact and resulting diffusion of linguistic traits between languages. Language contact occurs when speakers of two or more languages or varieties interact on a regular basis.[116] Multilingualism is likely to have been the norm throughout human history and most people in the modern world are multilingual. Before the rise of the concept of the ethno-national state,
monolingualism was characteristic mainly of populations inhabiting
small islands. But with the ideology that made one people, one state,
and one language the most desirable political arrangement,
monolingualism started to spread throughout the world. Nonetheless,
there are only 250 countries in the world corresponding to some 6000
languages, which means that most countries are multilingual and most
languages therefore exist in close contact with other languages.[117]
When speakers of different languages interact closely, it is typical
for their languages to influence each other. Through sustained language
contact over long periods, linguistic traits diffuse between languages,
and languages belonging to different families may converge to become
more similar. In areas where many languages are in close contact, this
may lead to the formation of language areas
in which unrelated languages share a number of linguistic features. A
number of such language areas have been documented, among them, the Balkan language area, the Mesoamerican language area, and the Ethiopian language area. Also, larger areas such as South Asia, Europe, and Southeast Asia have sometimes been considered language areas, because of widespread diffusion of specific areal features.[118][119]
Language contact may also lead to a variety of other linguistic phenomena, including language convergence, borrowing, and relexification
(replacement of much of the native vocabulary with that of another
language). In situations of extreme and sustained language contact, it
may lead to the formation of new mixed languages that cannot be considered to belong to a single language family. One type of mixed language called pidgins
occurs when adult speakers of two different languages interact on a
regular basis, but in a situation where neither group learns to speak
the language of the other group fluently. In such a case, they will
often construct a communication form that has traits of both languages,
but which has a simplified grammatical and phonological structure. The
language comes to contain mostly the grammatical and phonological
categories that exist in both languages. Pidgin languages are defined by
not having any native speakers, but only being spoken by people who
have another language as their first language. But if a Pidgin language
becomes the main language of a speech community, then eventually
children will grow up learning the pidgin as their first language. As
the generation of child learners grow up, the pidgin will often be seen
to change its structure and acquire a greater degree of complexity. This
type of language is generally called a creole language. An example of such mixed languages is Tok Pisin, the official language of Papua New-Guinea, which originally arose as a Pidgin based on English and Austronesian languages; others are Kreyòl ayisyen, the French-based creole language spoken in Haiti, and Michif, a mixed language of Canada, based on the Native American language Cree and French.[120]
Linguistic diversity
SIL Ethnologue
defines a “living language” as “one that has at least one speaker for
whom it is their first language”. The exact number of known living
languages varies from 6,000 to 7,000, depending on the precision of
one’s definition of “language”, and in particular, on how one defines
the distinction between languages and dialects. As of 2016, Ethnologue cataloged 7,097 living human languages.[122] The Ethnologue establishes linguistic groups based on studies of mutual intelligibility, and therefore often includes more categories than more conservative classifications. For example, the Danish language that most scholars consider a single language with several dialects is classified as two distinct languages (Danish and Jutish) by the Ethnologue.[121]
According to the Ethnologue, 389 languages (nearly 6%) have
more than a million speakers. These languages together account for 94%
of the world’s population, whereas 94% of the world’s languages account
for the remaining 6% of the global population. To the right is a table
of the world’s 10 most spoken languages with population estimates from
the Ethnologue (2009 figures).[121]
Languages and dialects
There is no clear distinction between a language and a dialect, notwithstanding a famous aphorism attributed to linguist Max Weinreich that “a language is a dialect with an army and navy“.[123]
For example, national boundaries frequently override linguistic
difference in determining whether two linguistic varieties are languages
or dialects. Hakka, Cantonese and Mandarin are, for example, often classified as “dialects” of Chinese, even though they are more different from each other than Swedish is from Norwegian. Before the Yugoslav civil war, Serbo-Croatian was considered a single language with two dialects, but now Croatian and Serbian
are considered different languages and employ different writing
systems. In other words, the distinction may hinge on political
considerations as much as on cultural differences, distinctive writing systems, or degree of mutual intelligibility.[124]
Language families of the world
The world’s languages can be grouped into language families
consisting of languages that can be shown to have common ancestry.
Linguists recognize many hundreds of language families, although some of
them can possibly be grouped into larger units as more evidence becomes
available and in-depth studies are carried out. At present, there are
also dozens of language isolates: languages that cannot be shown to be related to any other languages in the world. Among them are Basque, spoken in Europe, Zuni of New Mexico, Purépecha of Mexico, Ainu of Japan, Burushaski of Pakistan, and many others.[125]
The language family of the world that has the most speakers is the Indo-European languages, spoken by 46% of the world’s population.[126] This family includes major world languages like English, Spanish, Russian, and Hindustani (Hindi/Urdu). The Indo-European family achieved prevalence first during the Eurasian Migration Period (c. 400–800 AD),[citation needed] and subsequently through the European colonial expansion, which brought the Indo-European languages to a politically and often numerically dominant position in the Americas and much of Africa. The Sino-Tibetan languages are spoken by 20%[126] of the world’s population and include many of the languages of East Asia, including Hakka, Mandarin Chinese, Cantonese, and hundreds of smaller languages.[127]
Africa is home to a large number of language families, the largest of which is the Niger-Congo language family, which includes such languages as Swahili, Shona, and Yoruba. Speakers of the Niger-Congo languages account for 6.9% of the world’s population.[126] A similar number of people speak the Afroasiatic languages, which include the populous Semitic languages such as Arabic, Hebrew language, and the languages of the Sahara region, such as the Berber languages and Hausa.[127]
The Austronesian languages are spoken by 5.5% of the world’s population and stretch from Madagascar to maritime Southeast Asia all the way to Oceania.[126] It includes such languages as Malagasy, Māori, Samoan, and many of the indigenous languages of Indonesia and Taiwan.
The Austronesian languages are considered to have originated in Taiwan
around 3000 BC and spread through the Oceanic region through
island-hopping, based on an advanced nautical technology. Other populous
language families are the Dravidian languages of South Asia (among them Kannada Tamil and Telugu), the Turkic languages of Central Asia (such as Turkish), the Austroasiatic (among them Khmer), and Tai–Kadai languages of Southeast Asia (including Thai).[127]
The areas of the world in which there is the greatest linguistic diversity, such as the Americas, Papua New Guinea, West Africa,
and South-Asia, contain hundreds of small language families. These
areas together account for the majority of the world’s languages, though
not the majority of speakers. In the Americas, some of the largest
language families include the Quechumaran, Arawak, and Tupi-Guarani families of South America, the Uto-Aztecan, Oto-Manguean, and Mayan of Mesoamerica, and the Na-Dene, Iroquoian, and Algonquian language families of North America. In Australia, most indigenous languages belong to the Pama-Nyungan family, whereas New Guinea is home to a large number of small families and isolates, as well as a number of Austronesian languages.[125]
Language endangerment
Together, the eight countries in red contain more than 50% of the
world’s languages. The areas in blue are the most linguistically diverse
in the world, and the locations of most of the world’s endangered
languages.
Language endangerment occurs when a language is at risk of falling out of use as its speakers die out or shift to speaking another language. Language loss occurs when the language has no more native speakers, and becomes a dead language. If eventually no one speaks the language at all, it becomes an extinct language.
While languages have always gone extinct throughout human history, they
have been disappearing at an accelerated rate in the 20th and 21st
centuries due to the processes of globalization and neo-colonialism, where the economically powerful languages dominate other languages.[128]
The more commonly spoken languages dominate the less commonly spoken
languages, so the less commonly spoken languages eventually disappear
from populations. The total number of languages in the world is not
known. Estimates vary depending on many factors. The consensus is that
there are between 6,000[129] and 7,000 languages spoken as of 2010, and that between 50–90% of those will have become extinct by the year 2100.[128] The top 20 languages,
those spoken by more than 50 million speakers each, are spoken by 50%
of the world’s population, whereas many of the other languages are
spoken by small communities, most of them with less than 10,000
speakers.[128]
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization
(UNESCO) operates with five levels of language endangerment: “safe”,
“vulnerable” (not spoken by children outside the home), “definitely
endangered” (not spoken by children), “severely endangered” (only spoken
by the oldest generations), and “critically endangered” (spoken by few
members of the oldest generation, often semi-speakers). Notwithstanding claims that the world would be better off if most adopted a single common lingua franca, such as English or Esperanto,
there is a consensus that the loss of languages harms the cultural
diversity of the world. It is a common belief, going back to the
biblical narrative of the tower of Babel in the Old Testament, that linguistic diversity causes political conflict,[28]
but this is contradicted by the fact that many of the world’s major
episodes of violence have taken place in situations with low linguistic
diversity, such as the Yugoslav and American Civil War, or the genocide of Rwanda, whereas many of the most stable political units have been highly multilingual.[130]
Many projects aim to prevent or slow this loss by revitalizing endangered languages and promoting education and literacy in minority languages. Across the world, many countries have enacted specific legislation to protect and stabilize the language of indigenous speech communities.
A minority of linguists have argued that language loss is a natural
process that should not be counteracted, and that documenting endangered
languages for posterity is sufficient.[131]
See also
Notes
The gorilla Koko reportedly uses as many as 1000 words in American Sign Language,
and understands 2000 words of spoken English. There are some doubts
about whether her use of signs is based on complex understanding or
simple conditioning; Candland (1993).
“Functional
grammar analyzes grammatical structure, as do formal and structural
grammar; but it also analyzes the entire communicative situation: the
purpose of the speech event, its participants, its discourse context.
Functionalists maintain that the communicative situation motivates,
constrains, explains, or otherwise determines grammatical structure, and
that a structural or formal approaches not merely limited to an
artificially restricted data base, but is inadequate even as a
structural account. Functional grammar, then, differs from formal and
structural grammar in that it purports not to model but to explain; and
the explanation is grounded in the communicative situation”; Nichols (1984)
The prefixed asterisk * conventionally indicates that the sentence is ungrammatical, i.e. syntactically incorrect.
Citations
Tomasello (1996)
Hauser, Chomsky & Fitch (2002)
“language”. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (3rd ed.). Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. 1992.
Lyons (1981:2)
Lyons (1981:1–8)
Trask (2007):129–31
Hauser & Fitch (2003)
Pinker (1994)
Saussure (1983)
Campbell (2001:96)
Chomsky (1957)
Trask (2007:93, 130)
Newmeyer (1998:3–6)
Evans & Levinson (2009)
Van Valin (2001)
Hockett, Charles F. The Problem of Universals in Language. 1966. Retrieved from “Archived copy”. Archived from the original on 10 November 2012. Retrieved 11 May 2013.
Hockett (1960); Deacon (1997)
Trask (1999):1–5
Engesser, Sabrina; Crane, Jodie S.; Savage, James L.; Russel, Andrew F.; Townsend, Simon W. (29 June 2015). “Experimental Evidence for Phonemic Contrasts in a Nonhuman Vocal System”. PLOS Biology. 13 (6): e1002171. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1002171. PMC 4488142 
. PMID 26121619. Retrieved 18 August 2017.
Engesser, Sabrina; Ridley, Amanda R.; Townsend, Simon W. (20 July 2017). “Element repetition rates encode functionally distinct information in pied babbler ‘clucks’ and ‘purrs‘“. Animal Cognition. 20 (5): 953–960. doi:10.1007/s10071-017-1114-6. PMID 28730513. Retrieved 18 August 2017.
Deacon (1997)
Trask (2007:165–66)
Haugen (1973)
Ulbaek (1998)
Tomasello (2008)
Anderson (2012:107)
Anderson (2012:104)
Clark,
Gary; Henneberg, Maciej (2017). “Ardipithecus ramidus and the evolution
of language and singing: An early origin for hominin vocal capability”.
HOMO. 68 (2): 101–121. doi:10.1016/j.jchb.2017.03.001. PMID 28363458.
Newmeyer (2005)
Trask (2007)
Campbell (2001:82–83)
Bloomfield 1914, p. 310
Clarke (1990):143–44
Foley (1997:82–83)
Croft & Cruse (2004:1–4)
Trask (1999:11–14, 105–13)
Fisher, Lai & Monaco (2003)
Lesser (1989:205–06)
Trask (1999:105–07)
Trask (1999:108)
Sandler & Lillo-Martin (2001:554)
MacMahon (1989:2)
MacMahon (1989:3)
International Phonetic Association (1999:3–8)
MacMahon (1989:11–15)
MacMahon (1989:6–11)
Ladefoged & Maddieson (1996)
Lyons (1981:17–24)
Trask (1999:35)
Lyons (1981:218–24)
Levinson (1983)
Goldsmith (1995)
International Phonetic Association (1999)
International Phonetic Association (1999:27)
Trask (2007:214)
International Phonetic Association (1999:4)
Stokoe, William C. (1960). Sign Language Structure: An Outline of the Visual Communication Systems of the American Deaf, Studies in linguistics: Occasional papers (No. 
. Buffalo: Dept. of Anthropology and Linguistics, University of Buffalo.
Stokoe, William C.; Dorothy C. Casterline; Carl G. Croneberg (1965). A dictionary of American sign languages on linguistic principles. Washington, D.C.: Gallaudet College Press
Sandler & Lillo-Martin (2001:539–40)
Trask (2007:326)
Coulmas (2002)
Trask (2007:123)
Lyons (1981:103)
Allerton (1989)
Payne (1997)
Trask (2007:208)
Trask (2007:305)
Senft (2008)
Aronoff & Fudeman (2011:1–2)
Bauer (2003); Haspelmath (2002)
Payne (1997:28–29)
Trask (2007:11)
Baker (2001:265)
Trask (2007:179)
Trask (2007:218–19)
Nichols (1992);Comrie (1989)
Croft (2001:340)
Greenberg (1966)
Comrie (2009:45); MacMahon (1994:156)
Croft (2001:355)
“Wall of Love – Mur des Je t’aime – Montmartre”. Travel France Online. Retrieved 30 November 2014.
Campbell (2004)
Austin & Sallabank (2011)
Levinson (1983:54–96)
Levinson (1983:226–78)
Levinson (1983:100–69)
Bonvillian,
John D.; Michael D. Orlansky; Leslie Lazin Novack (December 1983).
“Developmental milestones: Sign language acquisition and motor
development”. Child Development. 54 (6): 1435–45. doi:10.2307/1129806. PMID 6661942.
O’Grady, William; Cho, Sook Whan (2001). “First language acquisition”. Contemporary Linguistics: An Introduction (fourth ed.). Boston: Bedford St. Martin’s.
Kennison (2013)
“First Impressions: We start to pick up words, food preferences and hand-eye coordination long before being born”, Scientific American, vol. 313, no. 1 (July 2015), p. 24.
Beth Skwarecki, “Babies Learn to Recognize Words in the Womb”, Science, 26 August 2013 [1]
Macaro, Ernesto, ed. (2010). Continuum companion to second language acquisition. London: Continuum. pp. 137–57. ISBN 978-1-4411-9922-5.
Duranti (2003)
Foley (1997)
Agha (2006)
Dixon (1972:32–34)
Foley (1997:311–28)
Olson (1996)
Aitchison (2001); Trask (1999:70)
Clackson (2007:27–33)
Aitchison (2001:112)
Zentella (2002:178)
Labov (1994)
Labov (2001)
Thomason (2001:1)
Romaine (2001:513)
Campbell (2002)
Aikhenvald (2001)
Thomason & Kaufman (1988); Thomason (2001); Matras & Bakker (2003)
Lewis (2009)
“Ethnologue statistics”. Summary by world area | Ethnologue. SIL.
Rickerson, E.M. “What’s the difference between dialect and language?”. The Five Minute Linguist. College of Charleston. Archived from the original on 19 December 2010. Retrieved 17 July 2011.
Lyons (1981:26)
Katzner (1999)
Lewis (2009), “Summary by language family“
Comrie (2009); Brown & Ogilvie (2008)
Austin & Sallabank (2011)
Moseley (2010): “Statistics“
Austin & Sallabank (2011:10–11)
Works cited
- Agha, Agha (2006). Language and Social Relations. Cambridge University Press.
- Aikhenvald, Alexandra (2001). “Introduction”. In Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald; R. M. W. Dixon. Areal diffusion and genetic inheritance: problems in comparative linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 1–26.
- Aitchison, Jean (2001). Language Change: Progress or Decay? (3rd (1st edition 1981) ed.). Cambridge, New York, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press.
- Allerton, D. J. (1989). “Language as Form and Pattern: Grammar and its Categories”. In Collinge, N.E. An Encyclopedia of Language. London:NewYork: Routledge.
- Anderson, Stephen (2012). Languages: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-959059-9.
- Aronoff, Mark; Fudeman, Kirsten (2011). What is Morphology. John Wiley & Sons.
- Austin, Peter K; Sallabank, Julia (2011). “Introduction”. In Austin, Peter K; Sallabank, Julia. Cambridge Handbook of Endangered Languages. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-88215-6.
- Baker, Mark C. (2001). “Syntax”. In Mark Aronoff; Janie Rees-Miller. The Handbook of Linguistics. Blackwell. pp. 265–95.
- Bauer, Laurie (2003). Introducing linguistic morphology (2nd ed.). Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press. ISBN 0-87840-343-4.
- Bett, R. (2010). “Plato and his Predecessors”. In Alex Barber & Robert J Stainton (eds.). Concise Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language and Linguistics. Elsevier. pp. 569–70.
- Bloomfield, Leonard (1914). An introduction to the study of language. New York: Henry Holt and Company.
- Brown, Keith; Ogilvie, Sarah, eds. (2008). Concise Encyclopedia of Languages of the World. Elsevier Science. ISBN 0-08-087774-5.
- Clackson, James (2007). Indo-European Linguistics: An Introduction. Cambridge University press.
- Campbell, Lyle (2002). “Areal linguistics”. In Bernard Comrie, Neil J. Smelser and Paul B. Balte. International Encyclopedia of Social and Behavioral Sciences. Oxford: Pergamon. pp. 729–33.
- Campbell, Lyle (2004). Historical Linguistics: an Introduction (2nd ed.). Edinburgh and Cambridge, MA: Edinburgh University Press and MIT Press.
- Campbell, Lyle (2001). “The History of Linguistics”. In Mark Aronoff; Janie Rees-Miller. The Handbook of Linguistics. Blackwell. pp. 81–105.
- Candland, Douglas Keith (1993). Feral Children and Clever Animals: Reflections on Human Nature. Oxford University Press US. pp. 293–301. ISBN 0-19-510284-3.
- Chomsky, Noam (1957). Syntactic Structures. The Hague: Mouton.
- Chomsky, Noam (2000). The Architecture of Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Clarke, David S. (1990). Sources of semiotic: readings with commentary from antiquity to the present. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
- Comrie, Bernard (1989). Language universals and linguistic typology: Syntax and morphology (2nd ed.). Oxford: Blackwell. ISBN 0-226-11433-3.
- Comrie, Bernard, ed. (2009). The World’s Major Languages. New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-35339-7.
- Coulmas, Florian (2002). Writing Systems: An Introduction to Their Linguistic Analysis. Cambridge University Press.
- Croft, William; Cruse, D. Alan (2004). Cognitive Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Croft, William (2001). “Typology”. In Mark Aronoff; Janie Rees-Miller. The Handbook of Linguistics. Blackwell. pp. 81–105.
- Crystal, David (1997). The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Cysouw, Michael; Good, Jeff (2013). “Languoid, doculect and glossonym: Formalizing the notion ‘language‘“. Language Documentation and Conservation. 7: 331–59.
- Deacon, Terrence (1997). The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. ISBN 978-0-393-31754-1.
- Devitt, Michael; Sterelny, Kim (1999). Language and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Language. Boston: MIT Press.
- Dixon, Robert M. W. (1972). The Dyirbal Language of North Queensland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-08510-1.
- Duranti, Alessandro (2003). “Language as Culture in U.S. Anthropology: Three Paradigms”. Current Anthropology. 44 (3): 323–48. doi:10.1086/368118.
- Evans, Nicholas; Levinson, Stephen C. (2009). “The myth of language universals: Language diversity and its importance for cognitive science”. Behavioral and Brain Sciences. 32 (5): 429–92. doi:10.1017/s0140525×0999094x.
- “First Impressions: We start to pick up words, food preferences and hand-eye coordination long before being born”, Scientific American, vol. 313, no. 1 (July 2015), p. 24.
- Fisher,
Simon E.; Lai, Cecilia S.L.; Monaco, Anthony P. (2003). “Deciphering
the Genetic Basis of Speech and Language Disorders”. Annual Review of Neuroscience. 26: 57–80. doi:10.1146/annurev.neuro.26.041002.131144. PMID 12524432.
- Fitch, W. Tecumseh (2010). The Evolution of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Foley, William A. (1997). Anthropological Linguistics: An Introduction. Blackwell.
- Goldsmith, John A (1995). “Phonological Theory”. In John A. Goldsmith. The Handbook of Phonological Theory. Blackwell Handbooks in Linguistics. Blackwell Publishers. ISBN 1-4051-5768-2.
- Greenberg, Joseph (1966). Language Universals: With Special Reference to Feature Hierarchies. The Hague: Mouton & Co.
- Haspelmath, Martin (2002). Understanding morphology. London: Arnold, Oxford University Press. (pbk)
- Haugen, Einar (1973). “The Curse of Babel”. Daedalus. 102 (3, Language as a Human Problem): 47–57.
- Hauser,
Marc D.; Chomsky, Noam; Fitch, W. Tecumseh (2002). “The Faculty of
Language: What Is It, Who Has It, and How Did It Evolve?”. Science. 298 (5598): 1569–79. doi:10.1126/science.298.5598.1569. PMID 12446899.
- Hauser, Marc D.; Fitch, W. Tecumseh (2003). “What are the uniquely human components of the language faculty?”. In M.H. Christiansen and S. Kirby. Language Evolution: The States of the Art (PDF). Oxford University Press. Archived from the original (PDF) on 8 August 2014.
- Hockett, Charles F. (1960). “Logical considerations in the study of animal communication”. In W.E. Lanyon; W.N. Tavolga. Animals sounds and animal communication. pp. 392–430.
- International Phonetic Association (1999). Handbook of the International Phonetic Association: A guide to the use of the International Phonetic Alphabet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-65236-7.
- Katzner, Kenneth (1999). The Languages of the World. New York: Routledge.
- Kennison, Shelia (2013). Introduction to Language Development. SAGE.
- Labov, William (1994). Principles of Linguistic Change vol.I Internal Factors. Blackwell.
- Labov, William (2001). Principles of Linguistic Change vol.II Social Factors. Blackwell.
- Ladefoged, Peter (1992). “Another view of endangered languages”. Language. 68 (4): 809–11. doi:10.1353/lan.1992.0013.
- Ladefoged, Peter; Maddieson, Ian (1996). The sounds of the world’s languages. Oxford: Blackwell. pp. 329–30. ISBN 0-631-19815-6.
- Lesser, Ruth (1989). “Language in the Brain: Neurolinguistics”. In Collinge, N.E. An Encyclopedia of Language. London:NewYork: Routledge.
- Levinson, Stephen C. (1983). Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Lewis, M. Paul (ed.) (2009). “Ethnologue: Languages of the World, Sixteenth edition”. Dallas, Tex.: SIL International.
- Lyons, John (1981). Language and Linguistics. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-29775-3.
- Macaro, Ernesto, ed. (2010). Continuum companion to second language acquisition. London: Continuum. pp. 137–57. ISBN 978-1-4411-9922-5.
- MacMahon, April M.S. (1994). Understanding Language Change. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-44119-6.
- MacMahon, M.K.C. (1989). “Language as available sound:Phonetics”. In Collinge, N.E. An Encyclopedia of Language. London:NewYork: Routledge.
- Matras, Yaron; Bakker, Peter, eds. (2003). The Mixed Language Debate: Theoretical and Empirical Advances. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. ISBN 3-11-017776-5.
- Moseley, Christopher, ed. (2010). Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger, 3rd edition. Paris: UNESCO Publishing.
- Nerlich, B. (2010). “History of pragmatics”. In L. Cummings. The Pragmatics Encyclopedia. London/New York: Routledge. pp. 192–93.
- Newmeyer, Frederick J. (2005). The History of Linguistics. Linguistic Society of America. ISBN 0-415-11553-1.
- Newmeyer, Frederick J. (1998). Language Form and Language Function (PDF). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
- Nichols, Johanna (1992). Linguistic diversity in space and time. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-58057-1.
- Nichols, Johanna (1984). “Functional Theories of Grammar”. Annual Review of Anthropology. 13: 97–117. doi:10.1146/annurev.an.13.100184.000525.
- Olson, David R. (1996). “Language and Literacy: what writing does to Language and Mind”. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics. 16: 3–13. doi:10.1017/S0267190500001392.
- Payne, Thomas Edward (1997). Describing morphosyntax: a guide for field linguists. Cambridge University Press. pp. 238–41. ISBN 978-0-521-58805-8.
- Pinker, Steven (1994). The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language. Perennial.
- Romaine, Suzanne (2001). “Multilingualism”. In Mark Aronoff; Janie Rees-Miller. The Handbook of Linguistics. Blackwell. pp. 512–33.
- Saussure, Ferdinand de (1983) [1913]. Bally, Charles; Sechehaye, Albert, eds. Course in General Linguistics. Translated by Roy Harris. La Salle, Illinois: Open Court. ISBN 0-8126-9023-0.
- Sandler, Wendy; Lillo-Martin, Diane (2001). “Natural Sign Languages”. In Mark Aronoff; Janie Rees-Miller. The Handbook of Linguistics. Blackwell. pp. 533–63.
- Senft, Gunter, ed. (2008). Systems of Nominal Classification. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-06523-8.
- Swadesh, Morris (1934). “The phonemic principle”. Language. 10 (2): 117–29. doi:10.2307/409603. JSTOR 409603.
- Tomasello, Michael (1996). “The Cultural Roots of Language”. In B. Velichkovsky and D. Rumbaugh. Communicating Meaning: The Evolution and Development of Language. Psychology Press. pp. 275–308. ISBN 978-0-8058-2118-5.
- Tomasello, Michael (2008). Origin of Human Communication. MIT Press.
- Thomason, Sarah G.; Kaufman, Terrence (1988). Language Contact, Creolization and Genetic Linguistics. University of California Press.
- Thomason, Sarah G. (2001). Language Contact – An Introduction. Edinburgh University Press.
- Trask, Robert Lawrence (1999). Language: The Basics (2nd ed.). Psychology Press.
- Trask, Robert Lawrence (2007). Stockwell, Peter, ed. Language and Linguistics: The Key Concepts (2nd ed.). Routledge.
- Ulbaek, Ib (1998). “The Origin of Language and Cognition”. In J. R. Hurford & C. Knight. Approaches to the evolution of language. Cambridge University Press. pp. 30–43.
- Van Valin, jr, Robert D. (2001). “Functional Linguistics”. In Mark Aronoff; Janie Rees-Miller. The Handbook of Linguistics. Blackwell. pp. 319–37.
- Zentella, Ana Celia (2002). “Spanish in New York”. In García, Ofelia; Fishman, Joshua. The Multilingual Apple: Languages in New York City. Walter de Gruyter.
External links
This audio file was created from a revision of the article “Language” dated 2005-07-19, and does not reflect subsequent edits to the article. (Audio help)
| [show]
Links to related articles
|
Languages
.jpg)
_-_Google_Art_Project_-_edited.jpg)
.jpg)
Definitions from Wiktionary
Media from Wikimedia Commons
News from Wikinews
Quotations from Wikiquote
Texts from Wikisource
Textbooks from Wikibooks
Travel guide from Wikivoyage
Learning resources from Wikiversity