Is it also the case that the non-Finnish Scandanavian languages share the most vocubulary in the area of intellectual words and diverge the most in the area of practical words?Kare wrote: If I speak with a Swede or a Dane, I understand most of his conversation without any problem. I might ask him to repeat a word or to clarify his meaning now or then. I would speak in my normal Norwegian, but maybe I would modify a word a little now or then in order to get my meaning across. And if let's say a Swede told me a good story, I might retell it to a Norwegian friend. I would naturally concentrate on telling the contents in my own dialect, not trying to reproduce the grammatical forms of Swedish. I would not really be conscious of having "translated" anything.
I find this to be the case with the dialects of English and Spanish. British and American English generally use completely different words for practical things like some foods, clothing, houses, the parts of a car, etc. But if I read an academic paper, I generally can't tell if the author was British or American unless he uses a word like "color" which will indicate the dialect of the author by its spelling.
If this is generally true, then Buddha's Magadhi would probably be almost exactly the same as Pali in the area of intellectual stuff (mind, consciousness, reality, etc.), which is the majority of what Buddha talked about.
I think dialects are more likely to diverge in names for household items, greetings, and slang.
"Yo, wassup K-dawg?" "Good afternoon, Kare." "Hello, Kare." "G'day, Kare."
"I'm watching the TV." "I'm watching the telly." "I'm watching the boob-tube."
So we'll probably never know how the Buddha may have said the equivalent of "Waddup, bhikku-dawg?" when he was relaxing, but we probably have a faithful representation of his religious language.
