> please help me with the following sentence from Exercise 8:?
> di.t.thaa bho satta jiivasi.?

jiivasi is present tense: 'you live' or 'you are alive'. di.t.thaa is an indeclinable interjection:
'how wonderful!' Thus di.t.thaa jiivasi 'how wonderful that you are alive!' satta is vocative
singular 'o creature'. bho is also vocative singular, but it cannot be functioning as a
pronoun here. Grammatically it is a present participle apparently functioning as an
adjective, modifying and agreeing with satta. Its meaning is honorific. Thus di.t.thaa bho
satta jiivasi 'how wonderful that you are alive, honorable creature!' Two problems: (i) In
English it sounds quite bizarre to address anyone as 'creature' ('being' is just as bad). (ii)
The English sounds like the addressee was thought to be dead, but I doubt the Pali has
this connotation.

According to Warder, the Pali present participle differs in meaning from the gerund in its
implied tense with respect to the main verb. The participle implies the tenses coincide
while the gerund implies that its tense precedes that of the main verb. The sentence in
Exercises 8 'having dressed, taking a bowl I entered the village' is given as nivaasetvaa
patta.m aadaaya gaama.m paavisi.m. Presumably this speaker took the bowl before she
entered the village, so the gerund (aadaaya) is used rather than the present participle. In
English both forms use the suffix '-ing' (which is called both present participle and
gerund; they were distinct in earlier English). The tense of the (participial or gerundive)
clause may be specified as preceding the main verb by using 'have': 'taking a bowl' vs.
'having taken a bowl'. Warder uses the simpler 'taking a bowl' in this example; see his
observation under aadaaya on p. 48. English seems to be rather more flexible than Pali on
this point.

George Bedell

--- In Pali@yahoogroups.com, "Ong Yong Peng" <pali.smith@...> wrote:
>
> Dear Gunnar,
>
> thanks for the quick reply and reminder. I checked with Alan McClure's
> answers and found that jaya.m here is a present participle, which is
> grammatically correct.
>
> metta,
> Yong Peng.
>
>
> --- In Pali@yahoogroups.com, Gunnar Gällmo wrote:
>
> > And, for the next sentence, "jaya.m vera.m pasavati", I would
> > like to recommend it changed to "jayo vera.m pasavati", since
> > jaya is masculine.
>
> The line is citated from the Dhammapada (first line of stanza 201, or
> fifth stanza of the 15th chapter: Sukhavagga), where it is written
> "jaya.m" - not "jayo". I don't think we can change the canonical text,
> but a grammatical analysis would be welcome.
>