Re: atthesu

Hi Jim,

Thanks for your latest. some paki.n.na responses:

>  I think the future passive participle has the
>closest affinity to the optative or potential tense (sattamii)

I think this is right, and that your conclusion is supported in
Saddaniiti by the overlap in their functions. I'm in the process of
trying to sort this material out for myself, so if my explanations
aren't always clear, it could be for that reason.

As a fun aside, in connection with optatives: last night, watching a
James Bond movie on TV, I was struck by something Roger Moore said:
"this should be the control room". He was diving in a wrecked ship
and had a floor plan of the ship with him for reference. From the
plan he concluded that a certain room was the control room and said
so. By using 'should be' (roughly a sort of English optative) he is
marking the evidentiality-status of the statement. In this case he
marks it as a surmise, something like:

"This is the control room, not that I know for sure, but I believe so
with a relatively high degree of certainty, based on the map (though
I might have read the map wrong)"

Since by the time he'd have managed to say all that he would have
been running out of oxygen-helium mixture, (not to mention that the
bad guy with the robotic claw would have arrived), Bond is lucky
English has the word 'should'.

Something like this is expressed in Pali with the future tenses:
eta.m ki.m bhavissati? What might this be?. And maybe even "tva.m
Livinstaanavejjo bhavissasi" Dr. Livingstone, I presume. (though this
type of presumption might more commonly be expressed with maññe)

I'm not sure, but I think I remember seeing this sort of expression
with optatives as well, which is why I had the odd experience of pali
grammar irrupting into a fluff movie.

>
>I saw at Khp-a 125 the following gloss: "puujaneyyaananti
>puujaarahaana.m" which I think shows the araha sense of the 'eyya'
>suffix.

I agree that this example shows the araha sense, but it doesn't seem
to go either way on the question of whether the derivation is puujana
+ eyya or puuja + aneyya. Thanks for including this reference to
what's still seems like an open questions. (one of many, many open
questions these texts give rise to)


>There should be an explanation of 'atthesu'
>(semantic uses?) in some other grammatical treatise whether it be
>Sanskrit or Pali. I don't expect to find an explanation in Aggava.msa
>as he seems to assume the reader to be well-acquatinted with most of
>the technical terms, but then I haven't looked and one never knows
>what one will find.

I'll keep an eye peeled also, and mention it if I come across such a
discussion.


take care,

/Rett