Re: Pali grammatical terms & abbreviations

> Thanks for your suggested proposals but I have a feeling that most of
> us here will find most of them just not suitable for our purposes
> here. Sorry, if you're disappointed.

No, I'm not disappointed; however, my concern is that many textbooks (i.e.,
modern grammars) rely on English (and pseudo-Latin) grammatical concepts,
and apply them in an imprecise and inconsistent way to Pali grammar.  I
think everyone on this list is probably so advanced in their knowledge of
Pali grammar that they aren't thrown by these inconsistencies, but both in
comparing modern sources, and within a given modern textbook, there are
inconsistencies, and these LARGELY derive from the undertainty with which
the English grammatical terms have been applied to the Pali.

I would also say, e.g., there is no point memorizing paradigms in the wrong
order, and thus the inversion of "First Person" and "Third person", the
re-ordering of the (ordinal-named) noun declensions, etc., are all very
problematic for a student working with contemporary sources.  And it is (at
present) a *big* leap to try to learn from classical sources.

> I suppose the "continuative participle" is another way of saying the
> "present participle"?  I haven't seen any Pali term for this either.

No, it is supposedly a different participle; I can't quite figure it out,
but I haven't spent much time on it yet.

> I
> think the ordinal terms for the imperative and the optative are very
> old Indian terms predating Panini.

Yes, but they are isolated in the list of non-ordinal terms presented by
Kaccayana, and their numbers do not actually correspond ("ordinally") to
their position in that list.  I do not know any Pali grammatical source in
which those two ordinal names "make sense".  Your opinion on their antiquity
is very interesting to me --but it only elaborates the problem.

> I doubt PTS would be interested in printing any
> of their books in anything other than the Roman script.

Yes, I was making a rather arch joke on precisely that point; the PTS is
devoutly Roman Buddhist.

E.M.

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