Re: Pali background (was Re: pa.tipatti)

Hi, Jim:
Thank you very much for telling me about your Pali background.
I didn't know that A.K. Warder taught Pali at UofT. (Is he an
interesting person. (his grammar books implies otherwise).
Burmese are well versed in Pali (even in nowdays). I may be wrong,
but, in Sri Lanka, the traditional (Panini-type) learning traditiion
has very much disappeared. And when they learn these Indic languges,
they just use modern texts, which simply list verb and noun
endings. It is my understaning that in Burma, such a
traditional method is still well alive. I was exposed to such a
method with the grammar book, which, I think, was Rupasiddhi.
After studying Pali for seven years, I opened up the book, and
I couldn't read the very first sentence of the book, which
I still remeber: attho akkhara-sa~~nn-to cattariisa.m(?speeling?).
I knew the meaning of the individual words, and I knew the each ending:
'meaning'(nom/sg), 'character-image-ABLATIVE, and 48(?)(sg/nt).
But the whole sentence didn't make sense at all. I was told that
the whole setence means that if we have a very clear idea of how to
manipulate these  48(?) characters, (we can deal with)
(any) meaning (associated with any word).
The whole grammatical enterprise was very much similar to
so-called generative phonolgy in modern (1960's) linguistics,
in which to derive a surface form (e.g. purisa 'man'), one has
to know, among all the rules in  the grammar book, which rules
should be applied and in which order, so that one
can derive the above sufrace form from a highly abstract
'underlying form'. The exposure to such an abstract
treatment of a language was the begining point of my intrest in
Linguisics. Unfortunately, spending too much time in
linguistics, my Pali has become quite rusty. Just by listening to your
on-line conversation with Nina, I would like to remove
some of the rust.
tadao

for a while, being