Learn Pali Language

Tense and Moody? Must be a Verb... Pāḷi has three moods  in the present tense, which are used to express the speaker’s attitude toward the action. Indicative : used to express statements, proclamations, opinions. Optative : used to express the hypothetical, and also wishes or hopes Imperative : used to express commands and invitations The conditional too is often classified as a mood rather than a tense, though it is most often placed with the future tense. With this exception, all of the above moods exist only in the present tense. Each of the other tenses has only one mood. We saw the indicative mood in the last post.

The inflection of verbs is known as “ conjugation ”. It consists of changes in form to show differences in person, number, tense, mood, and voice. In this post we will start our look at the present tense in Pali. By now you may have realised that the available tools (DPR & Pali Lookup) are good but not infallible when it comes to detecting the inflections of Pali verbs. Nouns tend to be straightforward, there are many groups but the ending are fairly regular. However, verbs and their derivatives can be very irregular and multitudinous and not all the variations are caught by the automated parser - nor the dictionary. This then can cause the amateur translator hours of frustration in their attempts to search for that one illusive word not in the dictionary.

The last post looked at participle acting in passive sentences . In this post we'll continues with participles in active  Pali sentences, and specifically Present Participles. Just as a reminder, in an active sentence, the grammatic subject in nominative and the actor doing the action of the main verb will be the same ; and the verb will agree in gender & number with this agent/subject. A transitive  verb may also take an object  in accusative. Present Participles (Active) Present participles in English are easy to spot as they all end with ‘–ing’. Present participles are used in several ways: Adjective like: as verbal adjectives , (a modifier to a noun) The smiling girl..., the bouncing ball... as subject complements , (with copula) The girl is smiling ..., the ball is bouncing ... in subordinate clauses , the girl walked along, bouncing the ball Verb like: in periphrasis  - combination with other auxiliary verbs to create aspect , T...

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

The topic of passive sentences naturally leads onto participles . As such the next two post form a unit and should be read together. Now so far on this blog, we have dealt only with active sentences – where subject performs an action on some target object. With a passive  sentence (sometimes called the passive voice) the grammatical subject   gets something done to them! Compare:       Active voice   Passive voice Semantic : agent   patient   patient   agent Grammatic : subject transitive object   subject intransitive instrument   The dog chases the cat   The cat is chased by the dog