Dear friends,

the plan is to continue our online reading of Warder's after we have completed the postings of The New Pali Course Part II. Florent and myself are working our way through the exercises, and we are left with the remaining three. I have posted half of Exercise 24 earlier, and we are likely to complete all postings by August. This means we can resume Warder's in September.

For those who are keen to participate in the discussion but need further information, here it is.

Introduction to Pali, Third Edition
by A.K. Warder
Pali Text Society, 1991, revised reprint 1995

More information, including sample text from the book:
http://www.tipitaka.net/pali/synthesis/intro.00.cdv

I will be making available more sample text in July.

In our first reading in 2007, we completed lessons 1 to 16. In this coming second reading, we will work through lessons 17 to 23.

Lesson 17 summarizes the discussion of nouns in the preceding lessons, before moving on to introduce new concepts. I think this is a good bridging point for many of us. Those who had moved ahead with the book, this is a good chance to join the discussions with your thoughts and questions. Those who are new to the book, please go through the first 16 lessons to be ready for "round 2". Those who stopped at lesson 16, this is the chance to get back to it and study together.

At the moment, I am re-reading the earlier lessons, and I am currently at lesson 10. With this second reading, I hope to achieve the following:

1. continue with the online group reading, probably the first of its kind for a Pali grammar;

2. continue with the study guide for this book, which also stopped at lesson 16;

3. re-commence Pali-Day-by-Day series C, which was completed up to lesson 21 by John (Kelly), hence I will be posting my solutions for lessons 22 and 23;

4. compile a Pali grammatical terms/concepts index, which is similar to the one at the back of the book but also different.

This index will be complementary to another list we already have: http://www.tipitaka.net/pali/pgt/

I believe this index will be useful, especially with page numbers, for references to the book itself on grammatical concepts, and also in our study of classical grammars like the Saddaniti.

Lessons 17 to 23 covers topics which we have already seen in other texts, however the exercises at the end of the lessons will be new to those who have not attempted them before, including myself. This is where the opportunity is for us to further our understanding and knowledge of Pali.


metta,
Yong Peng.