Dear John and friends,

thanks again, John.

For #10, I am not sure, but I rely on your knowledge that 'aagato' is
in the equivalent of English Present Perfect Tense. We know that
words in this form can be active or passive. The passive is similar
to past participle in English. The active is a bit hard, because the
English past perfect is only in the passive voice.

metta,
Yong Peng.

--- In Pali@yahoogroups.com, John Kelly wrote:

> 9. Paapakehi amaccehi rañño ko attho?
> from evil / from ministers / to king / who? / matters
> Out of the evil ministers, who matters to the king?
I would suggest that "attho" means "good, welfare" here rather
than "matter". Thus, one can translate:
from evil / from ministers / for the king / what? / good
From the evil ministers, what good (is there) for the king?
I think this makes a little more sense. Do you agree?

> 10. Amhaaka.m raajaana.m passitu.m puratthimaaya disaaya dve
> raajaano aagataa.
> our / king / to see / to East / from direction / two /
> kings / had come
> The two kings had come from the direction to the East
> to see our king.
"had come" is a tense that in English is called "pluperfect", as
opposed to "have come" whiich is "perfect" tense. As far as I can
tell, Pali doesn't use a pluperfect, and would probably use aorist
for something like "had come". Since Pali does use the past
participle (here "aagataa", with an implied copulative - honti) for
the perfect, I would translate this as "have come".

Also, perhaps "direction to the East" could be more fluently
translated as "Eastern direction". Thus for the whole sentence:
The two kings have come from the Eastern direction to see our king.