>Hi
> In Lesson 11 of the Pali Primer it has on the "present
>participle" >Present participles are formed by adding -nta / maana to
>the verbal base.
>
>In Charles Duroiselle's A practical Grammar of the Pali it has -nta
>for "Active Present participle" and has -maana for the "Reflextive
>Present participle",while the Primer makes no distinction between the
>2. Do I have this correct?

I haven't seen Duroiselle's "Practical Grammar", but from what you quote it
doesn't sound terribly practical. What he says is true of Sanskrit, but
practically speaking has little relevance to Pali.

In Sanskrit the suffix -nta is used for the active present participle,
whereas -maana is used to show that the action reflects back on the
doer. For example, the equivalent of labhanta in Sanskrit means "getting"
and the equivalent of labhamaana means "getting for oneself".

In Pali texts although both suffixes are still used, any difference in
meaning they may once have had has been entirely effaced. So the Pali
labhanta and labhamaana can both mean either "getting" or "getting for
oneself".

Nevertheless, the old Pali grammarians did go on referring to -nta as an
active form (parassapada) and -maana as a middle voice or reflexive form
(attanopada). But the distinction is an artificial one that relates only to
grammatical form, not to meaning.

Best wishes,

Robert

P.S.

I received some messages from people saying that they could not open the
Friedlander files I sent them because they were embedded in the e-mail
itself. I often have problems like this when sending attachments. Anyhow,
in case this applies to you, I wish you to know that I have uploaded the
docs to the files section of another Yahoo list:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/prokopton. I will leave them there for a
couple of weeks before deleting them. It isn't necessary to join the list
to download the files.

RE