Re: questions

Dear Num,

>Thanks krap A.Amara for the Thai translation. It's kind of funny to see and
>read Thai in Romanized  script.   There is a thick accent in it :)   Remind
>me of something, are there accent marks in Pali.?

There are no (pitch) accent marks in Pali, but you can see them in the Vedic
and Sanskrit texts which I think have just three accents: high tone
(udaatta), low tone (anudaatta), and a combination of the two (svarita).
Pali, like Sanskrit, has two stress accents on the syllables: heavy (garu)
and light (lahu).

> Like in Thai we have
>"ake-to-tree-catava" to make the tone and meaning of a word change.   Thai
>and Pali are quite different. In Thai there is no grammatical gender, no
>plural form, and no tense.  Another question, why Pali in English spelled
>with "P", in Thai from my understanding we call it "Bali"

I'd say that the "P" is the correct one. Doesn't your Pali-Thai dictionary
show it spelt with a "P"? "v" is sometimes changed to a "b" in Pali as in
'byaapaada' but the unchanged form 'vyaapaada' is also seen.

>Jim, I will be in Montreal next Saturday for week to attend a conference,
and
>then I will rent a car a drive around for another 5 days.  As I can recall,
>you are in Canada.  May I ask, where are you in Canada?

I live about 90 miles north of Toronto near Georgian Bay (Lake Huron). A
road map shows a distance of about 610 kms from Montreal to here which
would take a full day to drive. You're welcome to visit but I must warn you
that my living situation is quite primitive and not ideally suitable to
accommodate an overnight guest comfortably unless you want to rough it.
Perhaps staying in one of the local inns might solve the problem. If you're
still interested just contact me off-list and I will give you my exact
location and directions. If you'd rather tour Quebec you might consider
Quebec City and the north shore of the Gaspe Peninsula to Perce.

>I think it's my
>privilege if I can meet with sappurisam or sappurissa, ( single accusative
or
>dative I am not sure, I guess it should be "suppurissa savane"!! Just want
to
>try to change the word for in this case number of noun, I guess).

If you're using a Pali word in an English sentence, I'd use the uninflected
stem form "sappurisa". The dative sing. is "sappurisassa". I found another
commentary ref. that reads a plural for 'sappurisa' with sa.mseva (DA iii
1020).

>Does verb
>change with single or plural in Pali like in English?   I took a look in
>Wader and could not find where is it in the book.

The verb has forms in the singular and the plural like in English but much
more of them as in French. Look in Warder's index under 'agreement' for more
information on concord between verb and agent. Pali is a highly inflected
language where one has to learn ever so many endings which are hard to
remember. It's certainly not easy to look at lines of Pali and know what
each inflectional ending refers to.

Best wishes,
Jim


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