Hi John,

You asked:

>
>badaalataaya antarahitaaya sannipati.msu,
>sannipatitvaa anutthuni.msu, ahu vata no, ahaayi vata
>no badaalataa ti.
>of the creeper / of the earth / by the disappearance /
>they assembled / having assembled / they lamented / ??
>/ alas / for us / ?? / alas / for us / creeper /
>(end-quote)
>On account of the disappearance of the creeper, they
>assembled together, and lamented, “Oh, woe is us! Oh,
>woe is us! The creeper!”
>
>tad etarahi pi manussaa kena cid eva dukkha-dhammena
>phu.t.thaa evam aaha.msu: ahu vata no, ahaayi vata no
>ti.
>so / now / too / people / whoever / surely / by
>bad-thing / touched / thus / they say / ?? / alas /
>not / ?? / alas / not / (end-quote)
>So even now, people say on experiencing something bad,
>“Oh, woe is us! Oh, woe is us”
>
>Can anybody shed some light for me please?

I think the sense of the lament is: "we had it but we lost it".

Since Pali has no verb for 'have' it's necessary
to say something 'is of us' to express the idea.
ahu is an aorist < bhuu (bhavati) meaning 'it
was'. It's not syntactically related to 'vata'
here, but to 'no', 'of us'. ahu no = 'it was of
us', or 'we had it'. I suspect 'ahaayi' is a
passive aorist from haa. ahaayi no = 'it waned,
was eliminated' of us, 'we lost it'. So you
might translate 'alas we had it, alas we lost it'.

This root-aorist form ahu/ahuu/ahud from
bhuu/bhavati, isn't explained in Warder until
lesson 30, page 353. It's not in his table of the
principle parts of verbs either. Sometimes he
makes us jump forward in the book. This can be a
bit confusing, and I share your frustration, but
that's how it is.

The passive haayati, on the other hand, is discussed in lesson 11, page 63:

"The form haayati (Lesson 9) is regarded as
intransitive active by some grammarians, taking
it to mean "diminishes", "withers away", as
against (pa)hiiyati meaning 'is abandoned'"

From haayati, an aorist is easy to form: a- haay-
i. Note the augment, which is often left out in
Pali. (the prefixed short-a).

[rant]The above info on the two passive forms
from haa, haayati and hiiyati, is an example of
the sort of erudite yet practical details that
Warder is full of. But it can be hard to absorb
this stuff early on in working through the book.
It was only later when the forms started turning
up in the readings that I began to realize just
how good his book is. It would help, though, if
it was a bit better indexed and cross-referenced.
It would also help if he had included footnotes
to Saddaniiti, Ruupasiddhi, Moggalaana etc from
where he has taken these grammatical
observations. For now I guess we'll just have to
pencil this kind of stuff into our own
copies.[/rant]

hope this helps,

/Rett