Why do the Southern Buddhist scriptures use Pali instead of Sanskrit, or why?

Generally speaking: Pali is the language of the common people, and Sanskrit is the language of the aristocracy.

Mantras, found only in Sanskrit Buddhist scriptures.

Pali is a colloquial language in ancient India, belonging to the Indo-European language family, the Indo-Iranian language family, and a Middle Indo-Aryan language of the Indo-Aryan branch, which is very close to Sanskrit, and is a colloquial language used by the mother of Maradha in the West of India, in the era of Ashoka, Mamadha transmitted the Theravada Tripitaka to ancient Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and other places, and after recording it in Sinhala in the fourth century A.D., in the fifth century A.D., Venerable Jueyin translated the Sinhala Tripitaka and the commentary into Pali script.

Sanskrit is a language of the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-Iranian language family of the Indo-European language family. The ancient languages most closely associated with it are Old Persian and Avestan of the Iranian branch.

It is Pali and Sanskrit and the mantras are all Sanskrit, because Master Xuanzang proposed 5 not to translate, the mantra will definitely not be translated, just transliterated.

The Pali scriptures were translated later, so the ancient Sanskrit ones are undoubtedly earlier.

Still, since you're speaking in Sanskrit, the Sanskrit scriptures that have been handed down today may not be clear—the beginning of discrepancies in the Chinese translations indicates that there have been errors in the Sanskrit scriptures.

Therefore, due to the circulation, it is not good to do it, but the later Pali is more reliable.

I believe that the Pali language is closer to the original teachings of the Buddha.

The Mahayana Buddhism recorded in the Sanskrit language system should be an extension and development of the future.

From a linguistic point of view, Pali is also derived from Sanskrit, which is a branch of Sanskrit and belongs to the folk language, while Sanskrit also has the difference between ancient Sanskrit and later popular Sanskrit, which developed from the Vedic religious language, and popular Sanskrit gradually influenced the languages of other Indian peoples, including Pali and later Hindi. Their fonts are also different, but the pronunciation still has a common foundation.

When the Buddha was alive, he objected to turning his words into a fixed type of script, whether it was Pali or Sanskrit, because once the language was turned into a fixed script, many possibilities for development and interpretation would be lost, and there would also be many human errors and limitations in development and interpretation. According to the analysis and research, when the Dharma was first assembled after the death of the Buddha, it was also like this, and it was not written until hundreds of years later that it was annotated in different popular areas with various customary words. Pali, or colloquial, is mostly spoken in the south, while Sanskrit is spoken in the north.

The influence of Pali is confined to the areas where Theravada is prevalent, while Sanskrit is prevalent in the areas where the Mass is prevalent.

When an ethnic group is integrated, its language may be forced to be deactivated for political reasons. In addition to Sanskrit, Pali, and Tocharo, medieval Jurchen scripts are also not used. The paucity of Tocharian literature, and the fact that there are too few surviving "people" who have a sense of kinship with it, means that no one regards Tocharian as their ancestor.

Many Han people in the Central Plains were actually Khitan or Jurchen, but who regarded Khitan or Jurchen as their "root"? Cultural disagreement has led to such a phenomenon.

These two languages are supposed to be the same mother siblings of ancient Sanskrit in ancient India, but Sanskrit developed into a noble and religious language, while Pali was only a dialect in the early days. The grammatical relationship between the two is similar, and the spelling and pronunciation of the words are similar.

According to linguistic research, around 1500 BC, the Vedas, a religious scripture written in ancient Sanskrit scripts, recorded the analysis of language, vocabulary, and grammar in ancient India. At the same time, there is also the "Interpretation Chapter" that studies its interpretation. The first of these was grammar, which in the ancient Indians believed to be the foundation of all knowledge.

These documents were written in ancient Sanskrit, but the text was not uniform, and most of them were passed down orally. In the 8th century B.C., the ancient Indians recorded it in Devanagari script from the ancient Semitic people, which in turn was very different from the popular colloquial Prakrit, which was the formal stereotype of the Sanskrit script.

In 600 300 B.C., the ancient Indian grammarian Banini compiled and summarized the materials of his predecessors and wrote the famous Sanskrit grammar book "Eight Books", which became the earliest grammar book in the Indo-European language family. The main focus of the book is Sanskrit, but some dialects of other regions are also taken into account, and Vedic languages are often compared with other dialects. In the 3rd and 2nd centuries B.C., there were grammar experts who commented on the book.

Since Sanskrit was used by the upper class in ancient times, it is very different from the popular spoken language of the people, there are many kinds of Poplitic languages, and some grammar experts have compiled one of them into the Maharash Trim language, which is used by Brahmans; The other was compiled into Pali by Gadayana and was used by Buddhists around 250 BC. Many of the inscriptions of Emperor Ashoka at this time were written in this script. In addition, there are many unsorted languages that have become local dialects, including Hindi, which was later established as the standard language of India.

All these languages: Hindi, the regional languages are related to Sanskrit, Maharashi, Pali.

See Introduction to a Brief History of Linguistics).

At present, Sanskrit is still recognized by many people, because Sanskrit is the specimen and source of many different ethnic languages in India, and there are commonalities in phonetic elements and alphabet spelling, grammar, but it is also a specimen language that has entered the museum, and there is no actual place to use it, and experts and scholars mostly study it in order to investigate ancient documents.

Pali has also been used continuously, but there are few ethnic groups that communicate with it today, and it is currently the religious language mainly used in Theravada Buddhism. All monks of Southern Buddhism learned this language from an early age, and almost all the scriptures of Southern Buddhism have been recorded and handed down in this language to this day.

Sukhihontu's answer is somewhat incomplete or vague because the main language in India is Hindi, which developed from Sanskrit. Tibetan is also the national language influenced by Sanskrit writing and grammar. Thai, Sri Lankan, Burmese, etc., also have their own languages, but they are all related to Pali.

The main ethnic group of Thailand is the same ethnic group as the Dai people in our country, and like the other two countries, they use and borrow the grammar of Pali to spell their own national language.

Pali and Sanskrit (sam!).skr!ta) belong to the same language family, and the vocabulary of the two is two-fifths homomorphic; However, Pali is relatively phonetic and grammatical in terms of phonetics, and there is no specific script for Pali, which is written in the languages of various countries.

Its letters include eight vowels (a, a, i, i, u, u, e, o), thirty-two parent sounds (k, kh, g, gh, n%, c, ch, j, jh, n, t!).，t!h，d!

d!h，n!，t，th，d，dh，n，p，ph，b，bh，m，y，r，l，v，s，h，l!, as well as an empty point m!. These letters are compared to Sanskrit, and the vowel in the Sanskrit alphabet is r!，r^!

l!，i^!, ai, au, patron s, s!

and silent h!, with the addition of the patronymic l!.

Pali:

It is now popular in Theravada Buddhist countries because the study of the Pali scriptures is predominant. For example: Thailand, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, etc.

Sanskrit: Hindu countries, such as India, are often used to record Hindu scriptures and philosophies.

I happened to be looking at a little bit of ancient Indian culture. It is said to be a dialect of ancient India, not Sanskrit. Sanskrit is a high-level language created by Brahmins, similar in nature to Latin.

In order to get closer to the general public, the Buddha placed special emphasis on writing scriptures in dialects, but in later generations it became common practice to write scriptures in Sanskrit.

As far as I know, the Buddha probably used Pali.

The Buddha should have spoken in Pali, and the texts were written in Sanskrit.

The southern transmission is Pali; Mahayana is mainly Chinese and Tibetan.

It must have been Sanskrit at first, but now there are not many Sanskrit scriptures left.

Chinese Buddhists are very confident in their translations, so with Chinese they don't pay much attention to the original text - so far, I think Chinese Buddhists deserve this confidence.