Re: sutta 7: the vaggas

Dear Sarah,

>--- Jim Anderson <jima@...> wrote: > Apologies
>for taking so long to send out this
>> lesson. The last one was sent
>> out on Feb. 21! I will try to get lessons out more
>> frequently.
>
>Jim, no need for any apologies....We all keep
>distracting you for one thing! Take your time.

>
>For me, I'm trying to memorise the sounds and order so
>that by the time the PTS card is produced i won't need
>to refer to it...but being busy, this all takes
>time...Actually, i find there is a lot of detail in yr
>lessons..not like a dsg post that one can often run
>through quickly....
>
>I don't know if it would help others if you explain
>the order as following the gutterals (unaspirated,
>aspirated etc), palatals, retroflexes, dentals,
>labials   or whether everyone knows all this.

Most of the details about places, instruments, and the manner of
articulation are dealt with in sutta 23 with the gutturals, etc. This is
pretty much covered in the introductory chapter of Warder's Introduction to
Pali. I think that if you were to take a university level Pali course you
probably would go through all this material in the first week. Here, a month
later we're far from being finished. I'm planning to write up something that
would contain all the information about the Pali sounds except sandhi
(another project).

To use the Pali dictionary with ease it is essential to have the dictionary
order of the letters well-memorized. Without this it takes considerably
longer to look up words. I remember when I was getting familiar with this
order of letters, I sometimes got it mixed up with the English alphabetical
order when switching between a Pali dictionary and an English one and vice
versa. It's much more difficult to get used to reading Pali in a different
script such as Devanagari, Burmese, Thai, etc. I can only read Pali in the
Roman, Devanagari, and Burmese scripts. I'd like to learn to read Pali in
the Thai script sometime but I'm not too keen on learning the Sinhalese
script which looks very difficult.

The last sutta on the vaggas has a few problems in it. As I had discussed
the meaning of vagga as 'group', I failed to point out the problem of each
single consonant being called a vagga also which contradicts the meaning of
'group'. The etymology of vagga given is also unusual in that Aggavamsa
derives it from the root 'vagg' which corresponds to the Skt. root 'valg'.
In the PED, there is no mention of 'vagga' as a consonant or a group of
them. The corresponding Skt. is varga (root v.rj). In some ways, Pali is a
harder language to learn than Sanskrit on account of the abundance of
confusing Pali homonyms which is not so in Sanskrit eg. Pali: vagga & vagga,
citta & citta; Sanskrit: valga & varga, citta & citra.

It appears to me that this list is taking on a life of its own and my
feeling is just to let it go where it wants to and hopefully in the right
direction. I find that I'm continually getting side-tracked on a daily basis
and I cannot keep up with responding to many of the messages that I want to
respond to. Yesterday, I was checking Amara's translation with the Pali and
found that this is a much more difficult job than at first appeared. For one
thing, I'm not at all familiar with that particular passage in the
Atthasalini and the same goes for most Pali passages in any text. When I
start digging into a text I soon realize how little I understand it. One
could easily spend hundreds of hours researching a single Pali paragraph and
still not fully understand it, but at least one will be making some
progress.

I hope to find more time to respond to some of your other messages.

Best wishes,
Jim