Hello Rett,

I would like to know why you advise starting looking
in the commentarial litterature rather than in the
canonic one ? Is it for statistical reason - because
commentaries would be more bulky ? Or for some other
reason ?

Thanks

With Metta

Jacques Huynen

--- rett <rett@...> wrote:

> 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
>

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