Pali is one of the thirteen unclassified Middle Indo-Aryan dialects derived from Sanskrit (Gordon, 2005). Pali has remained similar to Sanskrit, which in all likelihood is due to its primarily spoken usage by Buddhist monks, from roughly the 6th century BC to the 3rd century BC (Gupta, 2003). Though there is much discussion regarding its origins, Junghare (1979) suggests that Pali has its origins in Northeast India, in the modern province of Bihar. Junghare (1979) also notes that it is the possible origin of the language, Māgādhi. It is worth noting that, given Pali’s phonemic contrast in vowel duration, Pali is written in the literature as either Pali, Paali, Pâli, or with the macron, Pāli.

Pali went from being a primarily spoken language to one known for its written form when it was used to write the Tipitaka, the body of work that comprises the early Buddhist scriptures (1st century BC). In modern usage, it continues to be the liturgical language of Theravada Buddhism, which comprises many Southern Asian countries such as India, Sri Lanka, Bhutan, Burma (Myanmar), Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam. In short, Pali offers a unique linguistic context because it was a spoken variety of Sanskrit spoken by few and died out in its vernacular form, yet it holds the distinction of being the language used to write a canonical text for one of the World’s main religions.

Pali’s phonemic inventory consists of approximately forty-five phones - thirty-five consonants and ten vowels. As in Latin, vowel duration in Pali is phonemically-contrastive. The alphabet is phonetically-based in that every letter represents only one sound. The following table offers the consonant inventory.

In Table 1, take note that the dot below the retroflex consonants is at times represented to the left of the consonant (e.g., .l) in older texts. Similarly, the tilde (i.e., ~) may either be listed above or to the left (e.g., ñ or ~n). I also have added the corresponding IPA phonetic symbol for those cases in which the orthographical grapheme greatly differs from its phonetic symbol counterpart. Finally, I note that Table 1 includes consonants without an oral stricture, h and ṁ (Suzuki, 2002a, p. 101); in the case of the latter, it is often represented as `n in Pali grammar texts. Duroiselle (1906, p. 6) notes that this phone “has no classification; it is merely a nasal breathing found after short vowels.”

Concerning the vowel inventory, Pali has ten vowels; of which eight are at the phonemic level, and two (the short mid-vowels, [o,e]) are unfaithful allophones of their long counterparts, ō, ē); Pali maintains phonemic contrast regarding vowel duration, otherwise. The following table offers the vowel inventory:

Observe in Table 2 that the grapheme a is a mid-vowel when short in duration and a back vowel when long in duration. The written form of the other vowels coincides with their modern phonetic symbols. Finally, regarding both the consonantal and vocalic inventories for Pali, I note the great disparity found in the literature in the use of graphemes to represent the language’s different sound inventories; for this reason, I include the IPA phonetic symbols to avoid any confusion.

In the following section, we observe how consonants in heterosyllabic clusters interact when words are transmitted from Sanskrit into Pali.

Internal sandhi in Pali has long been a fascination to grammarians, especially when it results in consonant gemination. Childers (1879, p. 99) initially offers a less hopeful response to analyzing internal sandhi, “It would not only be a misapplication of labour, but positively misleading, to work out the rules of internal sandhi…”; he later adds that sandhi is “to a great extent optional.” (p. 100). Later, Müller (1884, p. 59) states, “…as the rules of internal sandhi form a part of the phonetics…” and notes that what he terms as “word sandhi” is not as imperative in Pali as it is in Sanskrit. He goes on to say that it only “takes place in certain cases” and varies “greatly as to its use or neglect” (p. 59). He also makes a very important distinction regarding the style of language used. That is, he notes that in prose, it is almost exclusively used in pronouns and/or indeclinables that are in conjunction with a verb or noun. In short, for neogrammarians, though it was a phonetically-driven phenomenon, it was, it seemed, one that was left not fully-explained or understood.

Kessler’s (1994) work on Classical Sanskrit suggests that phonological factors alone might not be able to explain sandhi and suggests that morphological factors might influence consonant cluster production ⁵ . Thus, the question that begs to be asked is this: Is Pali consonant gemination altered in any way when we add affixes to the stem? That is, will the addition of affixes affect how we currently view gemination within the base? In what follows, I analyze the effects that suffixes and prefixes have on consonant gemination to determine if we do indeed need a separate explanation for them or if our current understanding of Pali gemination within a base extends to affixes as well.

In Kessler’s (1994, p. 44) study, he suggests that different rules are not needed for suffix formation: “The situation is slightly obscured for stem-final consonants because the most common case in the morphology is for that consonant to form an onset with the ending.” The following example, (3), illustrates this tendency, seen here with the suffix -ta, which is used to form either a past participle or change a comparative into a superlative.

In the above example in (3), both consonants have equal sonority and thus the regressive assimilation, the predicted answer, indeed occurs. From the example in (3), it would appear at first blush that the consonant in the suffix is the one that geminates, as in the examples found in (2).

The only exception is the noted case in Schmeiser (2008) of the nasal in coda position, as in (4):

It is curious to note, though, that the suffix begins with a voiceless stop, which has the lowest sonority value in the consonant inventory and thus we ask, does the stop, as in (3), geminate (except when preceded by a nasal) because of sonority or because of a morphological effect? In addition, another question is, if the example in (3) follows the general trend for Pali gemination, does this trend extend to other suffixes?

Let us, then, consider another suffix, -ya , which takes place in the Passive Voice in the formation of verbal bases of the 3rd conjugation, of some gerunds, and of numerous derived nouns (Duroiselle, 1906, p. 15). Curiously, the consonant y either neutralizes with the previous consonant or fully assimilates to it, as in (5):

In (5a), the stop and the glide neutralize and then geminate, however, in (5b), the geminate is formed with the preceding nasal. Unlike its -ta counterpart, the consonant in -ya does not geminate. O’Bryan (1971, p. 36) points out that ya following a dental obstruent (e.g., mad + ya) results in a change from dy > jj.

In addition, in the case of (5b), we see progressive assimilation in that the stem-final consonant is that which causes gemination. Given that the nasal has a lower sonority value (6) than the glide (4), it is not surprising that we see progressive assimilation. In short, though it seems that sonority value continues to suggest a trend, the examples for -ta and -ya suggest that further analysis is needed to fully understand the complex nature of consonant assimilation in Pali, especially as it relates to suffixes. We will now move to prefixes to ascertain if a similar pattern emerges.

The prefix ud- ‘out of,’ ‘from,’ ‘up,’ ‘above,’ ‘away,’ always evidences regressive assimilation into a geminate, regardless of sonority. For example, recall Junghare’s (1979) approach based on a sonority value. The consonant with the lower sonority value “spreads” its feature of place and manner of articulation, as in (6):

In (6), given that the stop has a lower sonority value than a liquid, we correctly predict that the stop will “spread” its features and thus the geminate will be pp, and not *rr. If we look, however, at a consonant cluster in the prefix environment, a different result occurs, as in (7):

In (7), given that stop again has a lower sonority value than the nasal, we might ⁶ incorrectly predict *uddajjati, and yet the actual realization is ummajjati. Dutta (2017, p. 56) states in a footnote that this is an exception to the general pattern and leaves it for future research. Moreover, as seen below in (8), the prefix ud- uniformly undergoes assimilation:

In (8), in a sonority-value analysis, one observes that only in the case of the voiceless stop in (8b) would we expect ukkhipati, in that a voiceless stop has a lower sonority value than a voiced one (in this case, /d/). In the other examples, we would incorrectly predict the gemination to involve the voiced stop, if we are to base our argument on the sonority value of the segment. This, however, is not the case, as the voiced stop assimilates to an affricate (8a), a fricative (8c), and a liquid (8d). In short, the prefix ud- is seemingly problematic for recent analyses because the morpheme boundary only allows the consonant of the base to geminate, and never the consonant that is part of the prefix, regardless of its sonority relationship to its adjacent consonant. That said, it is a well-known observation in the morphophonological literature that prefixes interact differently with roots and stems than suffixes (Fábregas & Krämer, 2020, p. 1). Therefore, it is not entirely surprising that prefixes in this language pattern differently than suffixes. In (8), we see that a general pattern based on the sonority pattern does not work; in these examples, the prefix blocks ⁷ this pattern, and instead, the onset of the base always geminates.

In short, the data from these affixes in the current study seem to suggest that morphology affects Pali gemination differently than in a base of a word and thus we need to formalize an explanation that concisely captures its full effects. As concerns suffixes, they produce a variety of results; in one case, a nasal in coda position before a dental obstruent blocks gemination (e.g., danta ‘subdued’), yet in another, a nasal before a glide (e.g., gamma ‘gone’) produces progressive assimilation; finally, in a third case, majja ‘intoxicant’, we see neutralization of the dy cluster. Future research will need to consider the role that prosody, sonority, articulatory factors, and/or perhaps even grammatical function play on Pali gemination in the suffix environment.

Regarding prefixes, the data suggest that they pattern differently than their base-medial and suffix counterparts. That is, regressive assimilation always results in words that contain the prefix ud- regardless of sonority. It should be noted, however, that the vast majority of Pali prefixes end in a vowel; future research will need to investigate if there are any exceptions to what the data suggest in the current study.