Re: Introduction

Jim

Congratulations on setting up this group and many
thanks for inviting me to join.   I'm sure the propoer
study of Pali will prove very useful to our dhamma
studies.

I don't have any strong views on how to proceed. I'm
glad to see that there will be no compulsory homework,
books etc, but a little concerned that you haven't
said no exams - can I take this as agreed?!!

Looking forward to lesson 1.

Jon


--- Jim Anderson <jima@...> wrote: > 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
>
>
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