Dear John, Nina, Yifer and friends,

it is great to learn that Bhikkhu Bodhi is completing the AN
translation soon. I have heard something similar from John earlier.
Personally, I really look forward for his translation, but expect it
to take a while for the quality of his works.

Btw, it is also good to know that besides the upcoming Bhikkhu
Bodhi's translation, the PTS translation, and minor selected
translations by ATI and BPS, there are also non-English translations
available in Thai, German and other Asian and European languages. So
there are really an abundance of references especially for those who
know more than English. On top of all these, there is a full English
translation on metta-net, which will be a very good source of
reference for us! Check it out:
http://www.metta.lk/tipitaka/2Sutta-Pitaka/4Anguttara-
Nikaya/index.html

Nina, you may like to invite Connie to join us in the AN project. Her
experience will be very useful to us. In addition, your knowledge of
Pali and the commentaries will be very helpful too.

I am indeed glad that PTS counted 2,214 suttas in AN. This figure is
certainly more realistic and manageable than 10,000. But, we can
count along as we do our translations to be sure of the exact number.
It would be interesting.

We shall try to be flexible to accomodate everyone interested in the
project. I will keep that objective in mind, and invite those who are
following this thread to constantly make constructive suggestions on
improvement of project management and translation approaches. We are
not going to rush through with it, there would be more consideration
for quality than quantity.

At the same time, the AN project will avoid dominating all
discussions, so that there is always room for other threads or adhoc
discussions.

Besides flexibility, the project should be enjoyable too. It is not
to be a competing translation with the others. It should be regarded
as offering an opportunity for Pali students to get familiar with
Pali texts, to read them together, and share ideas and tips along the
way, it is a marvellous way to make friends too.

John, having read your examples, I agree that detailed grammatical
analysis can be too much to take in the long run. So, we would
probably do it just selectively. We would still maintain a vacabulary
list for each vagga or sutta though, and conduct detailed analysis
for the difficult words. The sutta index and lexicon are still in.


metta,
Yong Peng.

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

> AN is the largest of the four Nikayas with around 10,000 suttas.

Actual sutta counts vary, depending on who's counting and how some
suttas are counted as multiple tiny suttas in some editions and as
just one larger sutta in other editions. The PTS edition count comes
in at 2,214, which is a lot less overwhelming to comtemplate.
However, it is true that the AN is the largest of the 4 main Nikaaya.

> The detailed grammatical analysis actually aid in the trilinear, if
only John can illustrate further.

Yes, I will, in a follow-up post.

However, I also think that perhaps we shouldn't take on a grammatical
analysis of the whole Nikaaya. It would take more lifetimes than you
might imagine!

But it is a very useful Pali learning aid. So we should do some.

> 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.

Of your 2 ideas, I like #1 better. However, I'm not sure we can be
that rigid about the days. Those of us who might be interested in
participating all have different schedules, and we need to be
flexible.