Dear Rett, Charles, et al.

Personally, I am pretty convinced that we should not use "saddhi.m"
with things.

On page 8 of Lily de Silva's Pali Primer, she states: "Saddhi.m/saha
meaning 'with' is also used with the instrumental case. They are
not normally used with the nouns denoting things."

And Rett correctly points out: "this sort of issue is almost
certainly going to come up if we use materials with artificially
constructed exercise example ... For beginners, though, I think it
is much better to use exercises culled from the literature, to be
sure to preserve idiomatic subleties. If there aren't enough of
these 'genuine' practice sentences at the right level, we might need
to create them ourselves."

No need to create them ourselves, however, since that has been done
for us Both the Gair/Karunatillake Reader and Warder's Intro to
Pali ONLY use exercises culled from the Pali Canon. In the
solutions to the exercises in these books that I have been posting
to this list (series B & C), I have not yet come across even one
example where saddhi.m is not used with a person or persons.

With metta, John

--- In Pali@yahoogroups.com, rett <rett@...> wrote:
> Hi Charles and group,
>
> >I used "saddhi.m" in 11 (Aha.m madhunaa saddhi.m yaagu.m
pibaami!).
> >
> >I followed the previous discussion related to the use of saddhi.m,
> >but I'm unclear on the concensus opinion for its proper usage. Was
> >it decided that the only usage for saddhi.m supported in canonical
> >writings was "with another person"?
>
> As far as I can tell we didn't arrive at a conclusive answer. This
is
> the sort of question that trained linguists are well-equipped to
> answer, but it requires doing a special study, preferably based on
> the entire corpus. Even then, there is a risk that there are
> acceptable usages that just haven't made their way into the
> literature. Also, there can be a newer stratum of the language
which
> has developed among monks in SE Asia using Pali in their
> communications. This could be somewhat different from the Pali we
> encounter in the old books, but still be correct for its place and
> time. After all, English today is quite different than it was even
> 500 years ago.
>
> In any case this sort of issue is almost certainly going to come
up
> if we use materials with artificially constructed exercise
example.
> It's both a problem, but also an interesting challenge.
>
> For beginners, though, I think it is much better to use exercises
> culled from the literature, to be sure to preserve idiomatic
> subleties. If there aren't enough of these 'genuine' practice
> sentences at the right level, we might need to create them
ourselves.
>
> best regards,
>
> /Rett