[Buddha-l] Pali for Teacher

[F.K. Lehman (F.K.L. Chit Hlaing)]

A minor addition to Lance Cousins, if I may:

Actually, Thai acan is from the Sanskrit. This is easily seen because 
the Indic form has a simply last syllable with a palatalised initial 
(ry-), which allows, in Thai, the short final -a to be dropped, and 
then the ry- is simplified to just r-, now treated as a final of the 
second syllable, i.e. -aar, which becomes -aan because Thai turns 
final -r into final -n invariantly. In Pali, the cognate form is 
aacariya because Pali lacks complex-palatalised iniitial consonant 
clusters (e.g., Sanskrit ny, as in Punya, becomes Pali palatalised n 
(n with a tilde over it, which my e-mail client won't let me use 
here). That would NOT give the Thai form! The Burmese on the other 
hand bases on the Pali cognate.
    This may usefully be amplified by looking at the Burmese. Where 
Burmese bases on Pali, we get (Modern Burmese) asariya (used only in 
Burmese Pali and not Burmese proper), but the ordinary word for 
teacher, hsaya has to be from Sanskrit, as in Thai: elision of 
initial a- in Indic loanwords, regardless of length; ry>y (across the 
board in standard Burmese r becomes y, so the Skt. ry- simplifies to 
just y-); the final -a remains. It is a bit ore complicated to deal 
with why in Burmee, in either of the two forms (P and Skt) the first 
consonant, c, gets aspirated (Burmese hs- from P/Skt hypothetical ch- 
. I won't deal with it in detail, but only word initially can ch- 
exist never medially in Pali, only -c-: in Skt only the geminate 
-cch-, in P only -c-, so in Burmese borrowings it tends to be 
interpreted as aspirated in such loans for obscure phonetic reasons 
having to do with Burmese if it ends up as an initial (as in hsaya).
-- 
F. K. L. Chit Hlaing
Professor
Department of Anthropology
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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