Re: greetings and a couple of questions

Dear Robert,
I've done my years of Latin and Greek -- in fact I was a classics
major for my first two years of college before switching to math! I'm
amazed at how similar a lot of Pali grammar is to Greek and Latin,
although the vocabulary seems quite different (except for the
numbers). Yeah, I know. Generalizations based on the first three
lessons from Warder aren't worth the pixels their radiated from, but
that's my hypothesis for now: Similar grammar, different vocabulary.

> is that I still don't understand the English metalanguage, feminine
> masucline, and on and on. I bought some Latin grammar books which
> have helped here but need to look at them more.

I can see how Warder would be formidable if you've never learned
another inflected Indo-European language. I don't suppose Japanese
helps as much (I'm assuming you know Japanese). On the other hand, my
approach to learning language has seemed to change since studying
Chinese, which doesn't have such a structured grammar. Instead, a lot
of the learning is memorization and practice of various sentence
patterns. With the Pali, I'm doing more reading and re-reading of
sentences and less memorizing vocabulary lists than I did with Greek
and Latin. I think this approach is more effective.

> vol.4 for reading (along with their edition of the pali). I have
> Nyantilokas dictionary and the davids stede pali english dictinoary
> from PTS. Both are available on line.

If I don't have to sell everything I own to afford it, I will
probably spring for a hard copy of the PTS. I'll put it on hold,
though, until I make it to some real reading.

> They are often hard to use as
> the different variants of a word and inflected forms mean that you
> are often not sure whether the word is the right one.

Yep. Greek is difficult in that way too. I suspect that with
practice, it all gets easier.

> The dictionary
> that comes with cscd is very convenient(just highlight a word) but
> only gives about 40% of the words highlighted.

I really prefer paper, but the web dictionaries and CSCD are bound to
be helpful too.

> The quote you gave: Ta½ kho
> > panida½ dukkhanirodhag±min² paµipad± ariyasacca½ bh±vetabbanti
> me.'"
> I cut and pasted into palitrans 2 and it converts it to this form:
> 'Ta.m kho
> > panida.m dukkhanirodhagaaminii pa.tipadaa ariyasacca.m
> bhaavetabbanti me.'"

O.K. That looks much better. I have Palitrans up and running -- nifty
little program, isn't it.


> See the recent posts about this. I have managed to get the software
> that Jim mentioned working (wrote to Frank snow) and now have the
> whole CSCD installed on my computer in an easily search form. Write
> if you want more info. on this.

At this point, I have CSCD loaded onto my hard drive. I do searching
with the little key-typing help pad that comes with it. I can see
that getting burdensome if one wanted to do a lot of searches, but
for now, I'm content -- concentrating on that grammar!

Thanks for the help. I'm looking forward to learning more.

Dan

P.S. Sorry to talk your ear off today!