ABSTRACT
Asoka will take the path of least obscuration if he will see, in Pali, not any dialect, but a literary diction, evolved, by the labours of standardizing editors, from sayings repeated in many shades of Prakrit dialect. As such it is as hard to explain as is the emergence of literary English from varying Anglo-Saxon dialects, blended with a current official use of late Latin and Norman French. But perhaps no harder. And this holds analogously for other European tongues. Pali in fact is not the name of any localizable tongue. And it is not unreasonable to see the term Pitaka, as applied to three closed sets of "rows" of writing, emerging at the same time as the use of the word Pali. Sayings and Rules were earlier alluded to as Dhamma-vinaya, never as the two Pitakas. Besides these, there appears, especially in Vinaya contexts, the word Matika, literally, watercourse or channel.
