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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 ...

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