Dear Mahinda, Nina and all,

thank you.

The next question would be how do we translate this word, and its antonym asabbhi, into English.

May I say that this is in the present participle, but take the adjective meaning of 'good'.

Hence, sabbhi - by/with the good, asabbhi - by/with the wicked.

Please advise. Thank you.

metta,
Yong Peng.

--- In Pali@yahoogroups.com, Mahinda wrote:

> sabbhi = instrumental plural of sant.
> - sant (ppr of atthi) being.

This is one of those words whose formation becomes clear when the parallel word in Sanskrit is compared. The Skt word is sadbhi.h. Since Skt retains much older forms of Old Indo-Aryan, we can safely say that sadbhih had undergone certain regular phonetic simplifications and become sabbhi in popular speech and is found in that form in Pali.

The Skt form itself consists of two elements sat+bhi.h. The first element (sat-) is the so-called weak form of sant. The second is the regular instrumental plural ending. (-tb- becomes -db- by Sandhi).