Dear Ven. Kumara, Alan, John, Piya and friends,

thanks very much for your replies. I am actually looking for a warmer
response. Nevertheless, it is good to see things moving.

I can't agree less that this is a very ambitious project. AN is the
largest of the four Nikayas with around 10,000 suttas. I am proposing
that we start with the Ones, and proceed sequentially through to the
Elevens. Bhante, it is a good idea that we skip those available on ATI.
But, on the other hand, it is also good to just do them for these
reasons:

1. it is always an additional practice, and we get to read them in Pali.
2. ATI only has roughly 300 AN suttas, which is like 3% of it, and I
see no problem putting 3% extra effort to do them all, considering it a
long-term project.
3. working through these 300 suttas provides us a tab to check that we
are in-line with ATI, which can be very helpful for both parties.
4. even if their availability makes our task easier, we would still be
adding value with trilinear, detailed grammatical analysis, sutta
indexing and 'lexiconising'.

What do you think?

Piya, it is good to consider different stages, if you can elaborate.
The detailed grammatical analysis actually aid in the trilinear, if
only John can illustrate further. What is certain is we need to keep
the momentum going for the next few years. If having different phases
can ease things a bit, it will be good. But, I am also worried whether
people are still keen when we have finish all the 10,000 suttas and
then repeat it just for grammatical analysis.

I plan to run it as a dual thread on weekends, there are several ways
of going about it. I just thought of two:

1. The Ones on Saturdays and Twos on Sundays.
2. Grammatical analysis on Saturdays, and trilinear on Sundays.

The idea is to do less work on Sundays, and also to do slightly
different things between Saturdays and Sundays.

It is also good if people with wider contacts can enlist more help.
Like Piya can pass some passages to his students for exercises, or John
can hand out some to his friends as practice. But, this may need an
offlist coordination work. We can also rotate postings like what I did
with Nina for Maharahulovada's, or Dimitry and Derek for a couple of AN
suttas.

If all things are set, we can likely start with the preliminaries on
July 1!

metta,
Yong Peng.

--- In Pali@yahoogroups.com, Kumaara Bhikkhu wrote:

I think Sutta Translation would be more practical and useful. Like to
suggest that we go for suttas that have yet to be translated into
English (PTS aside), at least those that are unavailable on the Net
(ATI or elsewhere). Might be better to start with those which are
shorter or repetitive.