Dear Harry and Yong Peng

My heartfelt thanks to Harry, for your kind offer, and to Yong Peng for
your encouraging comments. But I think Bhadra is the one with whom you
should really discuss the details --- I can only advise.

Harry wrote:

> Dear Ven. Pandita, Badra, and friends,
>
> Your objectives 1 to 3 are the materials that I was looking for a few months ago as a beginner searching blindly through the internet for information on learning Pali through self study. In the end, anything that has the words "Pali, learn, study" were downloaded.
>
> Your discussion remind me of the headeache in organizing the downloaded Pali learning materials into a cohesive content system so that time is not wasted in searching for them in the local computer.
>
> A crude desktop organizer was created to reduce the headeache. As it might be useful to other beginners, it was refined into a Pali Content Management System for beginners available for download at the group repository.
>
> During system analysis and design, one of the main problems is the database and delivery system. Many simple databases were considered based on simple resources available to the end users ranging from text file to xml. In the end the search was narrowed down to using html as the database and delivery mechanism since update is not a frequent problem as compared to news item. Html is simple to build and operate, and is independent of any operaing system.
>

Yong Peng wrote:

Your offer to generate a list of verbs is greatly appreciated. I guess the number of verbs in the Tipitaka is in the thousands, if not tens of thousand. It is too daunting a task for one person to handle.
Hence, I would like to wait for the replies from Ven. Pandita and Harry if they are keen in collaboration.

I have downloaded and checked Harry's Pali Content Management. It is a
very useful tool for Pali students, having collected available
references into an accessible database.

However, What Bhadra and myself have envisioned is not so ambitious. It
is a text parsing tool to help students to learn Pali in the Burmese
way. In Burmese tradition, a Pali student should have the ability to
analyze any noun they encounter into the respective noun stem and
case-ending. Accordingly, I have to force students to learn declension
tables by heart, which is usually a miserable job for the teacher and
students.

The tool we have thought of is a workaround for this difficulty.Its
concept can be explained using an example:

Suppose input to the program is "tejaa". It is to be checked against the
declension tables kept in the database (say, those given in the New Pali
Course).

First, it would be checked against the declension of purisa (mas. noun
ending in a). And the algorithm would be roughly like this:

"tejaa" is similar to "purisaa" (since both end in aa preceded by a
consonant)

According to the declension table, "purisaa" has the stem "purisa" and
four possible cases --- nom. plu., voc. sing. /plu., and abl. sing.

Therefore "tejaa" has a possible stem "teja" of mas. gender and four
possible cases --- nom. plu., voc. sing. /plu., and abl. sing. (This
line should be the output)

Then "tejaa" is checked against the declension of citta (neu. ending in
a). The pattern of reasoning should be the same, and the output would be:

. . . "tejaa" has a possible stem "teja" of neu. gender four possible
cases --- nom. plu., voc. sing. /plu., and abl. sing.

In this way, the word "tejaa" would be checked against declension tables
one by one, and there would be many lines of output. Afterwards, the
student must use a dictionary and the context of the word to filter out
the irrelevant and get the noun stem and case that the author really meant.

At the next stage, we can add a dictionary or word-list to help the
student pick the correct stem quickly. In the example above, "teja" in
mas. gender does not exist in actual usage; the software can point out
this fact to the user after referring to the word-list.

The principle would be the same for conjugated verbs, only more
complicated. The software is to help the student analyze a conjugated
verb into its hypothetical components, and pick the correct ones.

What do you think?

> Please kindly let me know if you need a volunteer.
>
> Metta,
>
> Harry

Thanks a lot, Harry; you are warmly welcome. I hope to see many lively
discussions between you and Bhadra.

with metta

Ven. Pandita