Introducing Pāli and Buddhist Literary Chinese
Since RYI will conduct P ā li and Buddhist Literary Chinese in the coming Summer Program, I am happy to introduce these languages here, which I have studied before. In my opinion, the most difficult language to study is Chinese since there is no alphabet in Chinese characters. In other words, to read Chinese, we need to memorize each distinct character. From grammatical aspects, nouns and adjectives which do not inflect for case, definiteness, gender make Chinese is more challenging and difficult to comprehend. Moreover, verbs do not inflect for person, number, tense, aspect, or voice. To study Buddhist literary Chinese, usually students are firstly guided from the basic Classical Chinese text, such as Sanzijing . Pali and Sanskrit are very closely related and the common characteristics of both languages are easily recognized. In fact, a very large proportion of Pali and Sanskrit word-stems are identical in form, differing only in details of inflection. Pali nouns inflect...