Bon Gaultier, Eastern Serenade.]

1862.—"Bala posh, or Palang posh, quilt or coverlet, 300 to 1000 rupees."—Punjab Trade Report, App. p. xxxviii.

1880.—"... and third, the celebrated palampores, or 'bed-covers,' of Masulipatam, Fatehgarh, Shikarpur, Hazara, and other places, which in point of art decoration are simply incomparable."—Birdwood, The Industrial Arts of India, 260.

PALI, s. The name of the sacred language of the Southern Buddhists, in fact, according to their apparently well-founded tradition Magadhī, the dialect of what we now call South Bahar, in which Sakya Muni discoursed. It is one of the Prākrits (see [PRACRIT]) or Aryan vernaculars of India, and has probably been a dead language for nearly 2000 years. Pāli in Skt. means 'a line, row, series'; and by the Buddhists is used for the series of their Sacred Texts. Pālī-bhāshā is then 'the language of the Sacred Texts,' i.e. Magadhī; and this is called elliptically by the Singhalese Pālī, which we have adopted in like use. It has been carried, as the sacred language, to all the Indo-Chinese countries which have derived their religion from India through Ceylon. Pālī is "a sort of Tuscan among the Prākrits" from its inherent grace and strength (Childers). But the analogy to Tuscan is closer still in the parallelism of the modification of Sanskrit words, used in Pālī, to that of Latin words used in Italian.

Robert Knox does not apparently know by that name the Pālī language in Ceylon. He only speaks of the Books of Religion as "being in an eloquent style which the Vulgar people do not understand" (p. 75); and in another passage says: "They have a language something differing from the vulgar tongue (like Latin to us) which their books are writ in" (p. 109).

1689.—"Les uns font valoir le style de leur Alcoran, les autres de leur Báli."—Lettres Edif. xxv. 61.

1690.—"... this Doubt proceeds from the Siameses understanding two Languages, viz., the Vulgar, which is a simple Tongue, consisting almost wholly of Monosyllables, without Conjugation or Declension; and another Language, which I have already spoken of, which to them is a dead Tongue, known only by the Learned, which is called the Balie Tongue, and which is enricht with the inflexions of words, like the Languages we have in Europe. The terms of Religion and Justice, the names of Offices, and all the Ornaments of the Vulgar Tongue are borrow'd from the Balie."—De la Loubère's Siam, E.T. 1693, p. 9.

1795.—"Of the ancient Pállis, whose language constitutes at the present day the sacred text of Ava, Pegue, and Siam, as well as of several other countries eastward of the Ganges: and of their migration from India to the banks of the Cali, the Nile of Ethiopia, we have but very imperfect information.[[202]] ... It has been the opinion of some of the most enlightened writers on the languages of the East, that the Pali, the sacred language of the priests of Boodh, is nearly allied to the Shanscrit of the Bramins: and there certainly is much of that holy idiom engrafted on the vulgar language of Ava, by the introduction of the Hindoo religion."—Symes, 337-8.

1818.—"The [Talapoins] ... do apply themselves in some degree to study, since according to their rules they are obliged to learn the Sadà, which is the grammar of the Palì language or Magatà, to read the Vini, the Padimot ... and the sermons of Godama.... All these books are written in the Palì tongue, but the text is accompanied by a Burmese translation. They were all brought into the kingdom by a certain Brahmin from the island of Ceylon."—Sangermano's Burmese Empire, p. 141.

[1822.—"... the sacred books of the Buddhists are composed in the Balli tongue...."—Wallace, Fifteen Years in India, 187.]