Cher John,

Thank you very much for your very useful explanations. I am still
struggling quite a bit with the use of present and past participles. I
guess I need to do a lot more exercises and translations to understand
it more thoroughly. I am probably a bit misled by French where the
agreement of tenses follows quite strict rules (although confusing
sometimes!). If as you say I have to think at them as adjectives, I
imagine there's no big difference between the present and past
participles in this case and that they can be also mixed in the same
sentence.

I suppose the following sentences are equivalent:

Tasmi.m ucce rukkhe .thito vaanaro imasmi.m niice tarumhi nisinne.
Tasmi.m ucce rukkhe ti.t.thanto vaanaro imasmi.m niice tarumhi nisinne
Tasmi.m ucce rukkhe .thito vaanaro imasmi.m niice tarumhi nisiidante.
Tasmi.m ucce rukkhe ti.t.thanto vaanaro imasmi.m niice tarumhi nisiidante.

Merci beaucoup,

Florent

> Cher Florent,
>
> I'll have a crack at answering your questions on these sentences:
>
> > I am having some problems with the following 3 sentences from exercise
> > 20 p63-64 in Buddhadatta's New Pali Course.
> >
> > 1)Tasmi.m ucce rukkhe .thito vaanaro imasmi.m niice tarumhi nisinne
> > pakkhino oloketi.
> > [in] that / high / [in] tree / stood / monkey / [in] this / low / [in]
> > tree / sat / birds / looks at
> > The monkey which stood in that high tree looks at the birds which sat
> > in this low tree.
> >
> > Would olokesi not be more logical than oloketi since all the other
> > verbs are in the past? The tense agreement seems to be wrong.
>
> There is no problem with mixing past participles qualifying nouns with
> a present tense verb. Think of the p.p. simply acting as an
> adjective. Very literally, one could translate this as:
> "The monkey that stood in that high tree looks at the birds seated in
> this low tree." Which makes sense to me.
> Also, bear in mind that Pali often uses the present tense in a
> historical past tense sense, so that a translator into English would
> use the past tense even though the Pali verb is in the present. Thus,
> depending on the context around it, "looked at" may be quite
> appropriate. Compare the beginning of a large percentage of the
> suttas in the canon which generally start off along the lines of
> "Eka.m samaya.m bhagavaa (at some place) viharati", which one would
> translate along the lines of, "At one time the Blessed One was living
> (at X)", even though the verb is literally "is living".
>
> > 2)Bahunna.m baalaana.m puttaa tassaa nadiyaa gambhiire jale patitvaa
> > mari.msu.
> > many / [of] young ones / sons / that / [of] river / deep / [in] water
> > / having fallen / died
> > The sons of the many young ones from that river, fell in deep water
> > and died.
> >
> > I do not understand here the function of "tassaa" which is either
> > Genitive or Dative singular. Would it mean something like "the sons
> > living close to that river" which explains why I wrote "from that
> > river". Or should it rather be "tassa.m" (locative singular) which
> > then could be translated by:
> > "The sons of the many young ones [is foolish ones better?] fell in
> > deep water in that river and died"
>
> I see "tassaa nadiyaa" as genitive syntactically associated with
> "gambhire jale" not with "puttaa". Thus "in the deep water OF that
> river".
> Also, I think "foolish" might be more appropriate here than "young",
> since if they were very young they probably wouldn't have sons! Also
> I think the sentence is implying that they are foolish because they
> allow their sons to fall in the deep water.
>
> > 3) Mama bhaataraana.m majjhimo niice pii.the nisiiditvaa aama.m
> > phala.m khaadati.
> > my / [of] brothers / medium / low / [on] chair / having sat / unripe /
> > fruit / eats
> > Having sat on a low chair , the ??? of my brothers eats an unripe

fruit.

> > Majjhimo seems to be the subject of that sentence. I looked it up in
> > different dictionnaries and they don't mention any use of majjhimo as
> > a noun. I thought it might mean something as "middle-brother".
>
> Yes, I take "majjhimo" here to mean the "middle-brother". Remember in
> Pali that nouns and adjectives are very fluid and often when one sees
> an adjective (X, say) without an obvious corresponding noun, one would
> translate it is the X one or the X person or whatever fits the context.
>
> With metta, John
>