Robert Kirkpatrick:

>Thanks for all this Robert.I will study it carefully. I am certainly
>very interested in your notes - but you might need to add some
>explanantions
> One thing that occurs to me when I study the latinate phrases is why
>are they used at all. Why not use the pali grammatical terms . For
>those of us who didn't study latin most of the words are new so it is
>just as easy to learn the pali equivalents. Is it because most of the
>Pali readers such as Warder use them - and so we need them to
>comprehend these texts- or are the English terms more precise or
>convenient?

I think it is actually a good idea to learn the Pali names for grammatical
terms. A knowledge of these is necessary if you wish to read the Pali
commentaries. It can also come in handy when you want to consult any of the
old grammar treatises, e.g. to see how some word is derived or how a
complex compound word should be analysed. Also there are some features in
the Pali language which have no parallel in either English or Latin, and so
the English names given to these are apt to be imprecise and makeshift.

On the other hand, I do think it is better for a beginner to start with the
latinate English terms, unless he has learned an Indian language already or
is from an Asian country whose language is normally described using
grammatical terms taken from Pali or Sanskrit (Thailand, for example).
Firstly because the English terms are MUCH easier to remember. So many of
the Pali terms are alike that one can easily get them muddled:

kara.na-vacana, kaarita, kaaraka, kammakaaraka, kammadhaaraya,
kattukaaraka, kattaa, kriyaa, kiriyaa, kiriyaavisesa, kita, kitaka, kicca,
kammaka, akammaka, dvikammaka etc.

And secondly because quite often the English terms are rather more
informative than the Pali ones. For example, if you don't know what
'accusative' means you can always look it up in an English dictionary:

"the case of nouns, pronouns, and adjectives, expressing the object of an
action or the goal of motion" (Concise Oxford Dictionary).

You can then invent some mnemonic device to ensure that you remember what
the accusative is for.

By contrast, the Pali word for accusative is 'dutiyaa vibhatti' ('second
declension'), which tells you nothing at all. Similarly with verbs. The
Pali for the imperative mood (used when giving an order) is merely 'the
fifth' (pa~ncamii). If you are learning Pali with Warder's book, my
suggestion is that you stick to the English terms until about lesson 13
(when the author commences to describe the formation of compounds) and then
start to learn the Pali ones. A good resource for this is the list of
grammatical terms in ~Naa.namoli's "Pali-English Glossary of Buddhist
Technical Terms".

Best wishes,

Robert