Hi John and group,

>
>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."

Thanks, that's very helpful. Do you know if that advice is traced to
any of the traditional grammatical literature? Or is it a well-known
observation?

To try to test this further with a somewhat fanciful example, I
wonder what how it would work if the sentence was spoken by a
man-eating ogre wanting to say: I'm eating Devadatta with Kappa.ta.

I think here you probably still can't use saddhim to describe a
composite 'meal' even though the components are people instead of
things. Saying aha.m devadatta.m kappa.tena saddhi.m khadaami, would
mean I, together with kappa.ta, eat devadatta. If so then perhaps the
crucial definition of the usage of saddhi.m and saha would actually
be that they mark someone participating in the action of the verb,
doing it together with the agent.

So to take another fanciful example, in a fable from the 'land of
rocks' you could use saddhi.m in sentences like 'the boulder went to
town with the pebble'. Of course here the normally inanimate rocks
are just borrowing linguistic functions restricted to animate
objects because of the fictional context. But suppose you had the
following: "The boulder crushed the hut together with the wall of
mud". Here you have a non-animate agent of the sentence, and the
verbal action is non-intentional. Would saddhi.m be appropriate here?
My feeling is no, and you would just have to render it as 'the
boulder AND the wall of mud'. This even sounds better in English.

Perhaps the English 'I eat/drink A with B' could be simply be
rendered into Pali along the lines of 'I eat/drink A and B'? Aha.m
yaagu.m madhuna.m ca pibaami.


Best regards,

/Rett