Dear Jon,

thank you for the link. I tried it, and it's interesting. A tool like this for Pali should be fun too. I just recall that at the back of Pali Workbook (published by VRI), there is a list of "suffixes" for declension, conjugation, etc. It may be worth a look.

http://www.pariyatti.org/Bookstore/productdetails.cfm?PC=769

I note that many websites have been producing interesting materials for Buddhist studies, but hardly any truly leverage the power of the available technology. It is my aim to develop tipitaka.net into a site which facilitates interactive learning and collaborative study of the Pali language and the Tipitaka, via innovative web design.

My target audience will, for a while, be self-study beginners, like myself 10 years ago. For the more advance students, I believe the best mode of learning is a high degree of discussion and interaction, like what we are doing on this list, although a few advance learning tools would be useful.

I will update the group when I make some progress on this, it is long overdue to provide enhanced features to existing pages on tipitaka.net. However, I wouldn't want to type pages of my ideas and end up not accomplishing any. ;-)

Btw, I was once thinking about automatically sorting Pali words by its own collation sequence: a aa i ii u uu e o k kh g gh `n c ch j jh ~n .t .th .d .dh .n t th d dh n b bh p ph m y r l v s h .l .m

I have been sitting on it for a while, knowing that things are improving in many areas, and the effort to develop such a subroutine in the future will be easier than now. Even with Unicode, the program will have to be able to handle the aspirates kh, gh, ch, jh, .th, .dh, th, dh, bh and ph as single entities not two separate characters. I do have a rough solution in mind, but haven't got the time to implement it in PHP. Let me know if you have any idea.

metta,
Yong Peng.

--- In Pali@yahoogroups.com, Jon Fernquest wrote:

Today starting Pali programming in Ruby with baby steps using the basic grammar and vocab of Buddhadata's New Pali Course volume I and Narada to create a verb conjugator and noun decliner.

Gerard Huet has something like this: "[an] interface [that] gives the declension tables for Sanskrit substantives. Try out this declension engine by submitting Sanskrit stems with intended gender."
http://sanskrit.inria.fr/