Dear Nina and friends,

thanks. Your sentence is much better, allow me to add a 'it' to
remain faithful to the original Pali:

What was thus said, (it) was said on account of this.

In the BJT and PTS, this is part of a much longer sentence, however
it stands as one short sentence in CSCD. (Hopefully, it's not a typo)

I am not sure, but I tend to agree idam belongs to vuttan, and eta.m
to paticca. That is: ida.m eta.m paticca vuttan

ida.m (pronoun, nom. sing. neut.) it.
eta.m (dem. pronoun) this.

After looking up further on ta.m and ya.m, I learnt that both ta.m
and ya.m can be in either nominative or accusative case, so I wonder
if the sentence can be reconstructed literally as:

Thus it was said what? It was said on account of this.

metta,
Yong Peng

--- In Pali@yahoogroups.com, nina van gorkom wrote:
> > Iti ya.m ta.m vutta.m, idameta.m paticca vuttan"ti.
> > thus / which / it / was said / this / on account of / was said
> > Thus it was said, on account of this was (it) said.
>
> N: I would like to translate also ya.m:
> what was thus said, was said on account of this.
> The PTS (DII, 314) has: It was account of this that that was said
which was said (at the beginning).
> The context: it was explained at the end that people could attain
the goal, and at the beginning that this is the one and only Path.
> idameta.m is not easy. Does idam belong to vuttan, and eta.m to
paticca?
> The translations tend to be clumsy.
> The commentary repeats this verse, and before this adds: ekaayano
aya.m.
> bhikkhave, maggo..pe..
> In the Sutta text the same is repeated after Iti ya.m ta.m vutta.m,
> idameta.m paticca vuttan"ti.