Dear Yong Peng,
I must confess something to you. I always put off Warder because I
have so much work. However, if you or anyone else has a remark, I
would still take up the book. I need little instigations, like from
you today. Lesson 13 reminded me.

I looked up what Alan McClure had written before on compounds, we had
quite a discussion. He wrote on Tappurisas which is in Lesson 13:

In Pali@yahoogroups.com, Alan McClure wrote:

1) Tappurisa compounds:

Tappurisa compounds are composed of two or more words (adjectives,
participles, pronouns, and nouns) and can be used as a noun or an
adjective. The prefixed word is associated with the posterior word
(which predominates) via a direct relation that may have the quality
of the following cases, i.e., accusative, instrumental, dative,
genitive, ablative, or locative.

A Tappurisa compound which helps to illustrate this is "mad-house."
This may be explained by a dative relation such as "house for the mad"
as is the common usage of the word in English, or if it is indeed that
"the mad" own the house, then it may be "house of the mad" with a
genitive relation, though this sense of the term "Mad-house" in
English is not usual.

One could create a variety of other tappurisa compounds with the other
case relations such as:

English:

Fish-fry (acc): a frying session that cooks fish
Sword-fight (ins): fight by sword
Birthday-cake (dat): cake for a birthday
Book-learning (abl): learned from a book
Door-knob (gen): knob of a door
Home-made (loc): made in a home
----------
N: He also gave Pali examples and these I prefer to English which
puts me off.
------

Alan: Paa.li:

Ara~n~nagato (acc): gone to the forest
Buddhabhaasito (ins): Spoken by the Buddha
Buddhadeyya.m (dat): Worthy to be offered to the Buddha
Rukkhapatito (abl): fallen from the tree
Raajaputto (gen): a son of a king (prince)
Ara~n~navaaso (loc): living in the forest

It is important to keep in mind that though tappurisa compounds are
often used as nouns, they may also function as adjectives.

To borrow the example of "home-made" above, it is possible to say:

"These brownies are home-made" with "home-made" helping to clarify the
quality of the brownies, i.e., they were not bought from a store.
In this case, "home-made" serves as an adjective in relation to
"brownies."

The key is that when the final member of a tappurisa compound is an
adjective then we have a tappurisa functioning as an adjective rather
than a bahubbiihi compound (see below) which would function
adjectivally but end with a noun.

An important rule to remember for tappurisa compounds is that if the
words were separated, the second member would keep the same case as
the former compound while the prefixed member would have the case of
the relation between the two words. Example, if "sword-fight" were
separated, then "fight" would keep the case that the compound
originally had, and "sword" would have the instrumental case.
_____
(end quote).
Nina.

Op 30-jun-2007, om 2:38 heeft Ong Yong Peng het volgende geschreven:

> Please write to the group, by replying to this post, to share your
> thoughts and ideas, and discuss any topic or ask any question related
> to these four lessons.

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