Hi Thomas and group,

>
>
>bhuñjati/khaadati - both mean "to eat". I got the impression that
>bhuñjati means having a meal, while khaadati refers to devouring (like
>predator eating prey). is this close?

My impression is close to yours, that khaadati is more like 'chewing', and is more likely to be used of an animal devouring prey, as you say.

The rest of the questions you ask are not easy or obvious questions to answer. Perhaps someone here has looked into them and can answer, or has developed a feeling for the distinctions in their reading, but generally you'd need to do a corpus search and examine how the words are used in various contexts and see if you can detect patterns. We don't have the advantage of being able to quiz native speakers.

The Pali corpus isn't fully digitalized and searchable in the same way as, for instance, the Anglo-Saxon corpus is. There are also several strata or levels of Pali. One way to start would be to try to answer these questions just within the stratum of commentarial narrative Pali prose. (jaataka and dhammapada commentaries, rasavaahini, thuupava.msa etc). Maybe include epic writing like the mahaava.msa. Pali as 'standardized' in Sri Lanka.

Another issue is that you get into a certain amount of comparison with other prakrits, with Vedic and with Sanskrit. To really answer some of these questions you'd want wider knowledge of early and middle Indic, though personally I feel there would be a lot of value in just working within the commentarial Pali mentioned above and see how far you could go with exactly mapping the semantic fields of key 'everyday item' words. Technical vocabulary pertaining to Buddhism is a whole nother story.

best regards,

/Rett