--- Den mån 2010-01-11 skrev Nina van Gorkom <vangorko@...>:

<It depends which letter follows upon the eva.m. Take evam eva.m, the
first one is with m since it is followed by a vocal.
Evam me suta.m, thus I have heard : here it is followed by m, thus we
have m which is understandable when we think of the pronunciation, m
+m is the natural pronunciation.
The romanized Pali as edited by the Pali Text Society has: evam me
suta.m in the beginning of a sutta, for exmaple of the Majjhima
Nikaaya. The Thai is correct.>

Strictly speaking, yes; but when using Indian scripts, there is an additional problem.

I don't remember anything about Sinhalese script, but I think the system is similar to Devanagari; there, to write "eva.m", you write two signs for the syllables "e" and "va", and then you just put a dot above the second syllable to indicate the niggahita/anusvaara.

To write "evam", on the other hand, you have to write three signs for the syllables "e", "va" and "ma", and then put a hook (viraama) at the third syllable to indicate that the final "a" should be mute.

So in many manuscripts, the dot for .m has been used instead of the more complicated sign for an m not followed by a vowel, to save space and work.

There's no use to do so when using the Latin alphabet, of course.

Gunnar

http://hubpages.com/profile/Gunnar+G%C3%A4llmo
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http://metrobloggen.se/esperanto



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