Introduction

Dear all,

I was waiting for all invited members to join this group before
writing my first message to you. First of all, thank-you for joining!
We are starting with a small group of six members: Kom, Robert, Jaran,
Sarah, Jonothan, and myself. I have never set up an email discussion
group before and so it is quite a new thing for me to be a list owner
and moderator which comes with some added responsibilities. As you
probably know I have set the group up as one that is unlisted and
closed which I felt was the best option for this kind of a group. When
I chose the closed option, I was warned that I would not be able to
later change this to one of the other two options: open or restricted.
If there is anyone else you think should be invited to join us at this
time just let me know -- on or off list. I will not be making any
official announcement on dsg until later on when the time seems right
for it.

Since this group has only just started, I think some discussion is in
order on how we're going to go about studying Pali as a group. I'll
tell you some of my ideas which you can comment on or suggest other
ideas, if you like. For learning Pali there are some on-line books
that one might be interested in downloading, in particular, Narada's
primer, Duroiselle's grammar, and Buddhadatta's Pali-English
dictionary. I'm planning to create a page with links to on-line Pali
learning resources including where you can download these books. The
primer that I started with back in 1976 was Warder's Introduction to
Pali (Jaran tells me he has a copy) and found it to be quite good. For
this group, I thought it would be best to work with whatever is at
hand and to draw on many sources of learning Pali. I have a special
interest in working with native Pali grammars such as the Saddaniiti
(12th cent.) along with Panini's Astadhyayi. It is very interesting to
study an Indian language in terms of the old Indian system of language
description and it is my hope to share this with you.

In this group you're quite at liberty to do whatever you find is
appropriate to your situation. You will not be required to do any
homework, download material, buy books, or whatever. It's entirely up
to you on how involved you want to be.

I thought we could start by learning the alphabet of 41 letters and
their pronunciation. We could soon start working on simple short
texts from the Tipitaka. There are many very short suttas in SN & AN
that I don't think would be too hard for the beginner to work on --
with some help. We could also try working on short abhidhamma passages
and perhaps alternate between the two kinds of texts. I think my idea
is just to experiment with different approaches and see what works
best.

Any comments or suggestions?

Best wishes,
Jim