--- Nina van Gorkom <vangorko@...> skrev:

> But I remember that Rett
> explained that the Pali gerund is somewhat different
> from the English
> gerund. I forgot the details.

I don't know about English gerund, but in e. g.
Italian, there is a gerund with a funktion very close
to present participle (andando/andante, "going"),
while the Pali gerund has a completely different
meaning (gatvaa, "having gone").

I didn't understand this until I happened to look
through a grammar of Polish, and found there the two
forms "present gerund" and "past gerund",
corresponding to "-ing" and "having -ed" respectively;
so I suppose old Indo-European had two gerunds, and
that the Indo-Arian languages have later lost one and
the Romance languages the other, while the Slavic
languages - or at least some of them - have retained
both.

Some grammars use the term "absolutive" for the Pali
and Sanskrit gerund, I think.

(By the way, my Pali studies have helped me to
understand the Latin ablative better. It has such a
lot of functions - simply, I think, because it is
really three different cases with the same forms:
ablative proper, locative, and instrumental; so really
Latin, same as Pali, has eight cases, not just six, as
the grammars tell us.)

Gunnar

gunnargallmo@...