Learn Pali Language

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.

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...