Hi Stephen, Alan, Nina, Yong Peng and all,

>
>Gonda's book might not be easily available for many people. Another
>excellent and detailed explanation of compounds can be found in Coulson's
>Teach Yourself Sanskrit (Hodder Headline), which is very reasonably priced.

Yes I agree that's a better recommendation, thanks. Coulson is usually available in larger bookshops with a language section, and it has more of a personal, spoken-lecture style than the pithy Gonda. He also does a really nice job of illustrating the various sorts of compounds with English examples. For instance his list of determinative compounds (on page 87) runs through all seven possible case relationships between the two elements, in both noun and adjective forms:

1 [nominative] black:bird new:found, ice:cold
2 [accusative] door-stop man-eating
3 [instrumental] sword-fight hand-written
4 [dative] dining-room accident-prone
5 [ablative] book-learning trouble-free
6 [genitive] status-symbol class-conscious
7 [locative] side-door home-made

These can be analysed like this:

1 a bird WHICH IS black, something found WHICH IS new, something cold AS ice
2 it stops doors, eating men
3 a fight WITH swords, written BY hand
4 a room FOR dining, prone TO accidents
5 learning FROM books, free FROM trouble
6 a symbol OF status, conscious OF class
7 a door AT the side, made IN the home

This is just one example of his knack for explaining grammatical ideas in an accessible way. This book can really be helpful to Pali students as a complement to Warder. Buy it! :-)

From the above, if I were analysing a sentence and wanted to indicate compound type for "sword-fight", for example, I would write: sword-tp3-fight. tp meaning tappurisa and 3 meaning the instrumental case. -kdh- stands for kammadhaaraya, -dv- for dvandva etc.

To convey alternative resolutions of an ambiguous compound in this e-mail format, I use brackets, for example:

an accident-prone-dragon-slayer, huh?

[accident-tp4-prone]-kdh-(dragon-tp6-slayer)

[(accident-tp4-prone)-kdh-dragon]-tp6-slayer

The former means a slayer of dragons who happens to be prone to accidents. A St George the Clutz type of figure.

The latter is a slayer of accident-prone dragons (which I'd take as the less likely interpretation, unless the context warrented it.)

Anyhow this example may be a bit silly, but these sorts of questions arise all the time in reading Pali. A famous example is:

Mahaaparinibbaanasutta

Mahaa-(parinibbaana-sutta)

(Mahaa-parinibbaana)-sutta

Is it the sutta that is great, or the parinibbaana that is great?

I'm sure these ideas, and this sort of apparatus, are already familiar to many of you, but I hope they can be helpful to those who haven't yet sat down and learned about compounds.

best regards,

/Rett