Dear Mahipaliha,

I'm rather doubtful of taking the 'ra' of 'citra' to be a suffix.
Have you considered the possibility of the adjective 'citta'
(variegated, spotted) being derived from the Pali verbal root 'citt'
(to make a picture or wonder) ? This root is listed and explained in
the Saddaniiti as follows:

citta cittakara.ne, kadaaci dassanepi. cittakara.na.m
vicittabhaavakara.na.m. citteti, cittayati. citta.m. (from CSCD 3)

There is the corresponding Skt. root 'citr'. For 'citta' derived
from 'cit' (to think) the suffix is 'ta' and can be found in the
U.naadikappa of Kaccaayanabyaakara.na (Kacc 656 Burmese numbering).
The explanation of this from its vutti is:

aaramma.na.m cintetiiti citta.m, citra.m. cintenti
sampayuttadhammaa etenaati vaa citta.m, citra.m.

The sutta deals with the u.naadi suffixes 'ta' and 'tra'. In the same
vutti 'mettaa' (recently discussed on this list) is explained among
other like words having the same suffixes as:

midati sinehati etaayaati mettaa, metraa.

Best wishes,
Jim

--- In Pali@yahoogroups.com, "mahipaliha" <mahipal6@...> wrote:
>
> Reverting (though belatedly) to the discussion of the compound word
> citta-gu, I would like to clarify why I said citta - in this word
> is not a past participle. It is always helpful to look at the
> corresponding Sanskrit word to understand how a Pali word is formed.
> (They say Sanskrit is a transparent language: you can often clearly
> see the different elements that go to make up a word - prefixes,
> root, suffixes etc.) The Skt equivalent of Pali citta is citra. The
> two elements are cit- and -ra. The suffix is -ra, which is not used
> to form past participles. PPs are formed with the suffixes -ta
and -