Dear John and group,

> I have no recollection of seeing the
>personal pronoun used relexively in the suttas either (but my
>knowledge of the suttas is still pretty limited). I will be watching
>for it now, as you suggest.

I appreciate this a lot. It goes without saying that I'm happy to
keep an eye peeled for forms which you or any group member might be
interested in.

One thing, this proposed rule only applies to the third person
(tassa, tassaa, tesa.m). The first and second persons (I, you etc)
seem to use their corresponding possessives to refer to the same
subject often. So the following ought to be okay: aha.m me geha.m
devadattassa dadaami. I give my house to D.

>
>I just looked in Warder too, and Chapter 22 covers the use of attan
>and discusses relexive or possessive pronouns (including saka and
>sa). At the top of pg 187 (3rd ed.) Warder says: "sa is inflected
>according to the pronominal declension (Lesson 17) in all genders,
>but is very rarely used except in verse. The meaning is the same as
>saka." Here he is specifically talking about sa used reflexively.

Thanks, this is a useful passage in Warder. As you probably know, in
Pali there are two senses of the 'sa-' used as a prefix, which are
derived from different Sanskrit words. Warder's examples there,
samata 'his own opinion' and sahattha 'his own hand' are: sa < skt
'sva' 'own'. While the more common form from skt 'sa-' means
'together with'. Ex. Saa sabhaaginii paa.thasaala.m gacchati. 'She
goes to school with her sister'. Here that sa- prefex does _not_
mean _her_ sister. It just means _with_ a sister. It's assumed that
the sister is hers.

>Note that there is an analogy here to romance languages (e.g. French,
>Italian) where if one is saying something like "he raises his hand",
>they would use the equivalent of "he raises the hand". If the
>possessive pronoun was used, it would imply that one was rasing
>somebody else's hand.

Swedish has this structure as well. Although in this case what you're
describing seems to be a special rule concerning parts of one's own
body. The Pali rule I'm proposing is more general.

English "He sees his dog" could mean either 'he sees his own dog' or
'he sees that other guy's dog'. Swedish distinguishes the two: 'han
ser sin hund' and 'han ser hans hund' respectively. This is different
than the rule concerning body parts where you simply say 'the hand':
'han lyfter hand-en' 'he lifts the hand'.

Further, French (which I don't actually know) uses true reflexives as
in: je me grate le nez (sp?). Literally 'I scratch for myself the
nose', for English 'I scratch my nose'. Swedish says 'I scratch
myself on the nose'. I believe the Pali would be: aha.m naasa.m
ka.n.duvataami. lit: 'I scratch the nose'. (This is based on the
reference in Cone to Vin II 121, line 1, 'chamaaya nisiidanti
gattaani ka.n.duvanti, they sit in the shade and scratch their limbs)
Note in this latter 'their' is unstated, instead of there being a
form of 'saka' or 'attan'. Again, though, this could have to do with
special rules for body parts.

Pardon my long excursion into Swedish and French, but I just wanted
to show how there can be a bit of complexity to these issues. I've
been rather sloppy with my use of terms like 'reflexive' and so on.

To try to formulate the proposed rule more precisely I might say: the
genitive form of the third person demonstrative pronoun can not be
used in a sentence with the same referent as the agent of that
sentence.

best regards,

/Rett