Learn Pali Language

We’ve covered a lot of Pali syntax already and this post is a recap and summary. I’ve put together a quick reference guide to Subject-Verb Agreement to aid students (and myself ) when attempting to translate. This helps to determine which word belongs where... I’ll paraphrase Duroiselle & Bomhard here: Clauses in Pali have at least two elements: The “subject” — the person, place, or thing which the sentence is about – always in nominative case or implied. The “predicate” — that which happens to the subject. The predicate may contain: A main finite verb, in which case it must agree with the subject in number and person. A past passive participle used as a finite verb., in which case it must agree with the subject in gender and number. (Present participles never appear as finite verbs) A noun with an implied hoti ‘to be’ understood after it, in the same case and usually number, but no concord of gender or number need take place! An adjective with an implied hoti ‘to be’ u...

In the last post we looked at passive sentence construction . Now we can move on to take a look at participles  in Pali. If you're not familiar with participle use already, they can seem a little perpelexing. So we'll work through them slowly. Whereas English has only past & present participle forms, participles in Pali have distinct past, present & also future/potential forms. In Pali its common to identify six kinds of participles: Past Active Participles, Past Passive Participles, Present Active participles, Present Passive Participles, Absolutive / Indeclinable Participles, Future Passive / Gerundive / Potential Participles

First let’s look at what a clause is and explain some terminology. Learning this terminology helps when reading grammar guides like Warder . Clauses - an overview Previously I said that sentence consisted in a noun phrase + a verb phrase. Strictly this is the description of a clause . A sentence can involve one or more clauses joined by conjunctions . clause noun verb John shouted   clause pronoun verb everybody waved conj and

When translating Pali, it is useful to begin by identifying the subject of the sentence , the verb corresponding to that subject, and then any objects of the verb. In order to do this, the first task is to determine the stems, case, gender and number of each word in the sentence. In the next post we'll look at methods for identifying stem endings . But for now here's a quick table for the nom. & acc. a/ā stems: SINGULAR   PLURAL stem ends: Masc. a Neut. a Fem. ā   Masc. a Neut. a Fem. ā Nom. -o -aṁ ∅   -ā -ā -āni ∅ -āyo Acc. -aṁ ...