Dear Ven. Pandita, Alex, Dmytro, Nina and friends,

I keep important questions raised at the back of my mind. It is getting
harder to trace messages in the archive given the volume of exchanges
we are having, but I think it is nonetheless a good sign.

Allow me to share a very recent experience of mine. I am currently
preparing a language guide for Ven. Narada's text. And I am at the
chapter on the Aorist. To double-check the tables, I compared with the
guide for Pali Primer, and I was almost shocked to death! The aorist
conjugations are almost entirely different in both texts. Next, I found
the forms given in Warder's and Gair&Karuatillake are closer to Pali
Primer than Narada's. I almost assumed there is some serious typo
spread throughout the book until I looked at Duroiselle's grammar. I
discovered that Ven. Narada actually introduced aorist forms that are
legitimate but the other authors chose to leave out, and vice versa!

So, I think a good grammar is necessary in times of need like this.


metta,
Yong Peng.

--- In Pali@yahoogroups.com, alexgenaud wrote:

are grammatical rules to be taken as generalizations or consistent
rules? For example, one can find the declensions of nara and other
words ending in -a in any basic grammar book. Can one assume that these
rules apply to ALL (or just most) masculine nouns ending in -a?