Short answers, pulled from the story.
The word Pali appears in commentarial traditions as a name for the language of the Theravada canon, yet it does not appear in the canonical literature itself. The spelling of the name varies across textbooks, appearing with both long ā and short a, and also with either a voiced retroflex lateral approximant or non-retroflex l sound.
Modern scholars generally regard Pali as having originated from a Western dialect rather than an Eastern one, challenging earlier identifications with Magadhi Prakrit. These similarities lead scholars to associate Pali with this region of western India, though it retains some eastern features referred to as Māgadhisms.
The first modern Pali-English dictionary was published by Robert Childers in 1872 and 1875, later receiving the Volney Prize in 1876. Following the foundation of the Pali Text Society, English Pali studies grew rapidly, with planning for a new dictionary beginning in the early 1900s but not completed until 1925 due to delays including World War I.
The Theravada tradition states that the Tipitaka was first committed to writing during the first century BCE, motivated by threats to the Sangha from famine, war, and the growing influence of rival traditions. This move away from oral preservation occurred under King Vattagamini, according to the Mahavamsa chronicle.
Pali is a highly inflected language where almost every word contains affixes that modify meaning beyond the root. Nouns are inflected for three grammatical genders and two numbers, displaying eight cases though many are identical in form, while verbal inflections convey information about person, number, tense, voice, and mood.