Thank you Robert for always giving great answers to my questions,
very much appreciated. I guess on the active/reflextive present
participle, when translating from english into Pali we should use
-nta for active and -maana for reflextive so as to be keeping with
the the old Pali grammarians, but with the understanding that in the
Pali texts they could be either/or.

Charles Duroiselle's A practical Grammar of the Pali can be
downloaded at>
http://www.tipitaka.net/pali/index.htm
I find it,as a beginner in Pali to be quite a useful reference.

Thank-you.

--- In Pali@..., Robert Eddison <robedd@...> wrote:
> >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