Thanks!Kare wrote:No. The Scandinavian languages have a grammar very similar to English (recently some linguists have put forward the theory that English is so strongly influence by the language of the Vikings that it ought to classified as a Scandinavian language as well - but that is another story). It can be found in Russian, however, and in classical Greek and Latin.Sylvester wrote:
BTW, does zero copula feature in Scandivanian languages?
I am not able to see any markedly different schools of Western Pali scholarship. I may of course be wrong, but as far as I can see, good tutors and grammars in English and German say the same. There are of course individual differences among scholars on some points, but that is just natural. It's the way it should be. And I also doubt that scholars are limited by their own vernaculars. If they were to produce spoken or written Pali themselves, such vernacular peculiarities would probably appear. But as for reading and understanding the classical text, once you have studied and understood the grammar, I do not think the results will be much influenced by the home region or vernacular of the scholar.If there is one drawback I see, not in Pali, but in the European scholarship on Pali, is that the diverse linguistic backgrounds of the scholars lead to the recognition of linguistic traits shared by Pali and their vernacular but not recognising the traits found in the other language. It seems that there are 3 great schools of Western Pali scholarship - the English, the Scandinavian and the German. Do you think there is a possibility that one day Pali grammar scholarship would be able to transcend the vernacular limitations of the scholars and be described in some meta-linguistics that aims to describe all languages?
I was prompted to muse on the 3 Schools by a comment made by a Pali scholar (can't remember who it was) who opined that the early scholarship in the 18th and 19th C showed vernacular bias in how Pali cases were classified. An "English" scholar might for example classify the chaṭṭhī as genitive, but another from another linguistic tradition might find it easier to place the chaṭṭhī in another case which rested more comfortably in that tradition. I've not seen any Scandinavian material (except Johansson?) but I agree that the English and German seem to use the same classification (assuming Warder and Geiger are representative of each).