Dear Jon Fernquest,

Thank you very much for these excerpts! This will provide me with food for thought for a time being.
I think it would be very interesting and fruitful to make a comparison between grammatical terms in Pali and those in Abhidhamma philosophy. Such researches are made for instance with regard to Aristotle's categories in antique philosophical tradition. I don't know whether something similar is relevant regarding Buddhist philosophy and must admit that in studying Abhidhamma I am just a beginner. I simply have thought about the ways in which language affects our thinking and perception of the world (as Sapir-Whorf hypothesis suggests), like for example the basic syntactic structure of subject-verb-object makes for us difficult to grasp the Buddhist concept about "doing without doer" (kammassa kaarako natthi, vipaakassa ca vedako) and so on. However, the extensive research of this topic would be an inspiring task given there is an opportunity to complete it.

With metta,
Ardavarz

--- On Wed, 12/24/08, Jon Fernquest <bayinnaung@...> wrote:
From: Jon Fernquest <bayinnaung@...>
Subject: [Pali] Re: The New Pali Course Part II [3-8/8]
To: Pali@yahoogroups.com
Date: Wednesday, December 24, 2008, 6:22 AM











Dear Ardavarz;



"It is very interesting what you wrote about philosophical aspect of Pali

Grammar regarding the relation between language and the world ...if

you could provide these examples from the sentences he quotes..."



Here is an example of four pages dealing with "Kaaraka" defined

as "factors of action" which groups the cases that have a "connection to

the action" (nominative, accusative, instrumental, dative, ablative, and

locative) which give the logical predicate of the sentence, but not

genitive or vocative cases:



http://jonfernquest .googlepages. com/kaarakapali. pdf



(Note: I guess this is more semantics than metaphysics (Abhidhamma) ,

but Pali grammatical writings and Abhidhamma do seem to share a

common writing or rhetorical style, enumerating rules in extensive

logically inter-related lists and being precise about the language

certainly must be essential to logical clarity in Abhidhamma, providing a

logical and semantic foundation for it. My personal interest stems from

working with legal and political texts like Dhammathats and Rajaniti, as

included in Bechert's PTS volume Nitisastra literature of Burma for

instance. These texts also make extensive used of inter-related lists in a

similar fashion to more core Pali texts of Buddhism).



BTW Abhidhamma must be the specialty of a prominent member of the

Pali list. I read the following book a couple of weeks ago from the Siam

Society:



Abhidhamma in daily life / Nina Van Gorkom

Names Van Gorkom, Nina

Publisher Dhamma Study Group, Bangkok, 1975



With metta,

Jon Fernquest





























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