Learn Pali Language

Participles are a kind of adjective formed from a verbal base. Like verbs, they divide into Present, Past and Future; and each group can again be divided into Active and Passive (voice). Being in the nature of adjectives most decline in the three genders - agreeing with their nouns (subjects), in number, gender and case. . So in Pali, we have seen there are roughly six kinds of participles: Past Passive Participles, Past Active Participles, Present Passive Participles, Present Active participles, Future Passive Participles / Gerundive & Indeclinable Participles, In this post we are going to look at how the declinable participles are formed (that's the first 5 above). There's going to be a lot of tables of endings and I apologise now for this. But it's an area where the tools (DPR & Pali Lookup) often fail. All the participles are composed of three components: verb root/stem + participle infix + nominal (case) ending. In the previous post we saw ...

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