Learn Pali Language

One of the main problems facing the novice student learning Pali is understanding the many terms and technical phrases littering the grammar guides. The theory of Pali verbs and verbal tense systems as described in the mainly Victorian Pali grammar guides employs many grammatical terms (often borrowed from Latin) to describe systems that were detailed by early Pali grammarians who themselves were usually following Paninian Sanskrit grammars. No wonder then that the modern reader can often feel overwhelmed. So this is an attempt to explain what's going on.

In linguistics, morphology is the study of words and how they are formed - their structure. So far, we have mainly focused on Syntax (How words combine to form phrases, clauses, and sentences). This post is an introduction to morphology (Study of words & how they change with role) before we move on to look at inflection in Pāli. A word can be deconstructed down into it's components parts, or 'morphemes', which are the smallest meaningful units of letters. Thus a word can be broken down into building blocks - morphemes - which in turn can be classified traditionally as roots, affixes and stems. Bits of words A 'root' is morpheme, which forms the basis of a word. It carries the basic meaning - which may be very vague and general. They are marked by the √ symbol as in the Pāli verb root √gam = 'to go'. A word has only a single root morpheme. When a morpheme occurs by itself, it is considered a root because it has a meaning of its own (e.g. the m...