Once you have installed a font (and can choose to write in it in your preferred text editor, like MS Word or Pages on a Mac), you will have to decide for a method to write the Pāli diacritics.
Those can unzip the files and enable you to install the font.
There are plenty of software options out there, e.g. Prior to installing fonts, you will likely need a programme to unzip the downloaded fonts (which are usually in a zipped format). But choosing one, downloading and installing it needs to be the first step you have to do. You can choose the font that appeals the most to your aesthetic preferences. It doesn’t matter which font you choose, since they all have the diacritics you need for Pāli.
Examples for general fonts which have all Pāli diacritics are: Adobe’s Source Sans Pro (used for this website) or Gāndhārī Unicode.ĭownloading Source Sans Pro is unfortunately surprisingly counterintuitive: (1) Click on “Select this font” on the top right, (2) a small box appears in the bottom right corner, click on it, (3) now you can click on the download arrow in the top right corner of the new box.Īn example for a designated Pāli font is URW Palladio Pali (used by the Buddhist Publication Society in Kandy, Sri Lanka). Some of them are used for all kinds of languages, others have been specifically developed for writing Pāli. There are numerous available fonts for writing Pāli diacritics. Now, in order to write Pāli diacritics, you need two things: (1) A font that includes the necessary diacritical signs and (2) a way of writing the Pāli characters that have these signs.
The Preview includes full access to “Lesson 4 – The Pāli Alphabet”, including access to our Alphabet Table PDF. If you want to see all letters which have diacritics, you can subscribe to the Pāli Level 1 Preview Course. In other words, to mix up, say, a with ā is just as bad a mistake as to mix up a with o. Examples are: ṇ, ñ or ḍĪgain, remember that the diacritic makes the letter it is applied to into a different letter (not some kind of variant form). Some vowels have a bar over them this is the diacritic called a macron and means that that vowel is long: ā, ī, ū. What does that mean for you, a Pāli learner? In the Pāli alphabet, several letters are written with diacritics, i.e., signs like those above which differentiate letters.
Fortunately, most word processors can produce at least the commoner diacritics.”¹
When you are citing a word, a name or a passage from a foreign language which uses diacritics, you should make every effort to reproduce those diacritics faithfully. Thus, French has words like été `summer’, août `August’, ça `that’ and père `father’ German has Wörter `words’ and tschüss `good-bye’ Spanish has mañana `tomorrow’ and ángel `angel’ Norwegian has brød `bread’ and frå `from’ Polish has łza `tear’, źle`badly’ and pięć `five’ Turkish has kuş `bird’ and göz `eye’ Welsh has tŷ `house’ and sïo `hiss’, and so on. “Diacritics, often loosely called `accents’, are the various little dots and squiggles which, in many languages, are written above, below or on top of certain letters of the alphabet to indicate something about their pronunciation. The following passage is a well-written introduction by the University of Sussex: These conventions also apply to the learning material from the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies (e.g.: our online courses on the platform). Along with the use of the Roman script goes a small set of conventions in punctuation, etc unlike in, say, Indian manuscripts, academic literature about Pāli separates words by spaces, uses capital letters for proper names, and often uses such punctuation as full stops, question marks and quotation marks. This way of writing Pāli is clear and unambiguous if one adds some diacritical marks to the normal Roman alphabet. In the West it has traditionally been written in the Roman script. There is no such thing as a Pāli script Pāli can be written in any script.
This article introduces some facts about Pāli and scripts to write it with, before it explains what diacritics are and gives detailed help with writing Pāli diacritics, including how to install a keyboard that allows you to write Pāli diacritics.įirst of all, it is important to note that Pāli is a language, not a script. A common problem learners of Pāli encounter, especially during the beginning phase, is how to write Pāli diacritics.