Hi Frank,

In the Digital pali Reader http://sourceforge.net/projects/digitalpali/ (new version available!) this funcion is automated.

Just click on a word in the text and in the grey line between the reading window and the dictionary window long words are broken down into possible dictionary entries.

Thus on clicking bhiyyobhaavaaya you get on the left:
bhiyyo- bhāvāya

and on the right

bhiyyo: exceedingly; more; in a higher degree; repeatedly. (ind.)
bhāva: condition; nature; becoming. (m.)

And in the dictionary window below the full PED-translation of Bhāva. You can easily paste bhiyyo into the search field to get the full PED translation of bhiyyo as well.


The DPR is really an amazing piece of work.

Translating a sentence becomes a matter of clicking the words one after another.It almost seems easy to translate a sutta!

Kind regards,

Ria Glas

--- In Pali@yahoogroups.com, frank <fcckuan@...> wrote:
>
> for you other Pali beginners out there, I learned how to use an
> interesting feature in CST4 to sort of make it translate a sentence at a
> time.
>
> I just mark and copy a line of pali text, either from CST4 suttas or
> worldtipitaka.org (or any site showing unicode compliant pali), paste it
> into CST4's dictionary search window. Because it does partial matching,
> and it only tries to show the possible definitions one word at a time
> (starting from left), I just put the cursor to the far left of the
> sentence, hold down the delete key to delete one character (then word)
> at a time, and the partial matching of the dictionary will usually do a
> pretty good job of finding a usable definition as I pass through each
> word until I get to the one I want.
>
> Before, I was marking, copying, pasting one single word at a time, and
> then realized by grabbing a whole sentence, or 2 or 3 words at a time
> and dropping it into the dictionary, it gets much speedier results. I
> tried a paragraph to test the limits, but it does seem to be limited to
> a certain number of characters in the dictionary search line.
>
> This has become my dictionary of choice because of its ability to read
> cut and pasted unicode pali, instead of only taking velthius input.
>