Быть тхеравадинским монахом - одно. Представлять Тхераваду, учить Тхераваде - другое.

"Более того, пали никогда не был разговорным языком ни в Магадхе, ни в каком-нибудь другом месте."

С уважением.

Also, numerous scholars have pointed out that Pa¯ li not only does not share many of the distinctive characteristics of the Ma¯gadhı¯ Pra¯ krit as shown in later inscriptions, primarily those of of the 3rd century B.C.E. Emperor Asoka (Sanskrit As´oka) (264–227 B.C.E.), but it does in fact share important features, such as noun inflections, of the western inscriptions. Thus, Pa¯ li does not appear to represent any single MIA dialect but to be a literary language that incorporated features from several dialects in the course of its development.

Victor H. Mair - Professor of Chinese Language and Literature in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania - пишет в 2017 году:

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=31294
Victor Mair said, March 2, 2017 @ 8:41 am From Jan Nattier:

The consensus among specialists, as far as I am aware, is that the Buddha probably spoke something called "Old Māgadhī" (one of many Prakrit/Middle Indic vernaculars spoken on the subcontinent at his time). Nothing was recorded in writing (or even passed down in memorized form, so far as we know) in this language, though some scholars have pointed to individual lexical items in a few Buddhist texts as likely to be "Magadhisms" (like the bits of Aramaic in the Greek New Testament I suppose).

Pāli was one of a number of languages in which Buddhist sacred texts were memorized and transmitted, the oddity here being that no one ever spoke Pāli as his or her native language; Jonathan is right, it is an "artificial Prakrit" (there is a classic article by von Hinüber on this, I'm sure I can dig up the reference if you don't find it easily), deliberately put together from more than one Prakrit (= vernacular) to serve as the language of sacred texts in one particular ordination lineage (the one that developed into the so-called Theravāda lineages of today).

Many other "Buddhist languages" (that is, languages used by various ordination lineages to transmit sacred texts) certainly existed, though we have little or no evidence of them. And as far as written textual remains go, Gāndhārī stands out as having by far the earliest surviving Buddhist manuscripts (as old as the 1st c. BCE).

So there is actually a quite clearcut answer to the question you asked: the winner is Gāndhārī, hands down. (and this is interesting also as an increasing number of early Chinese Buddhist translations are being shown to contain evidence of having been translated from Gāndhārī originals) Surviving Pāli manuscripts are many centuries later, and most other surviving Buddhist manuscripts already date from a period where the spoken vernaculars were being supplanted by BHS (and eventually, more classical Sanskrit). So the Gāndhārī texts provide a precious window into the "vernacular age" that pre-dated the age in which Buddhists moved away from using their own spoken tongues and began to use Pāli and Sanskrit as "church languages" (I have an ancient article on this in case that topic is of interest).

Гандхари живой, разговорный язык буддизма - до перехода на чисто литературные санскрит и пали.



С уважением.

Jonathan is right, it is an "artificial Prakrit" (there is a classic article by von Hinüber on this,

Так можно пали пракритом назвать? При том, что он искусственный? Я могу еще примеры привести, где лингвисты говорят об "искуственности" пракритов.

Unfortunately we cannot accept this literature as illustrating the actual vernaculars on which it was founded. To adapt them to literary purposes the writers altered them in important particulars, omitting what they considered vulgar, reducing wild luxuriance to classical uniformity, and thus creating altogether artificial products suited for that artificial literature which has ever been so popular in India. These literary Prakrits cannot, therefore, be considered as representing the actual speech of the people at any epoch, although they are based on it, and a veil is drawn by them between us and it which it is not always easy to lift.

Пали специально создан на Ланке для записи ПК и Дипавамсы.

Джордж Гриерсон, один из самых влиятельных лингвистов своего времени, руководитель  Linguistic Survey of India высказался по поводу литературных пракритов:

Как видим литературные языки спокойно можно пракритами называть.