[palistudy] Re: Pali grammatical terms & abbreviations

Hi Jim, Eisel and everyone,

Here are contributions to various points that have come up the last
day or so. As always, I'm very grateful if anyone points out errors
or misconceptions in my comments, either here or off list.

>Eisel: 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 agree about this being a risk. In particular I have personally run
into confusion by confusing form and function of the tenses/moods
(vibhatti).

The pañcamiivibhatti (5mi, imperative) is a set of inflexional
endings. But if we translate as 'imperative' it is easy to confuse
the set of endings with the function of 'ordering' 'commanding'.
'Ordering' is one common use of the imperative-endings but not the
only one.  Similarly, expressing present-time is one common function
of the vattamaanaa (present endings), but not the only one, and so
on. These are fundamentals, but I think they're worth stating, as an
example of the risk of confusion we students face when working with
both western and traditional grammatical concepts.

However, I don't think this is a reason to abandon the term
'imperative' in translation. One way or another, we just need to make
the distinction between form and function clear. Ways to do this have
already been demonstrated by various translators of Indian
grammatical literature, but when we're starting out we might not
initially notice the care with which they've worked.

>Eisel: 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.

In my ongoing translation of the Aakhyaatakappa of the Saddaniiti, I
have followed Senart's lead in Kacc and retained the western terms
3rd, 2nd and 1st person, but with a note to the effect that the
numbering is reversed. After all, translation is translation; it's
supposed to meet the needs of the target audience.

Retaining the Indian sequence is necessary (apart from being valuable
in its own right) because other rules refer to the grammatical
persons by their positions in the list. (such as in the rule of the
_later_ (paro) person taking priority when combing several
grammatical persons into a single expression, i.e. "he eats and you
eat and I eat" > "we eat", in the uttamapurisa, which is the last
grammatical person in the list, in the Indian sequence) Sd 868, Kacc
411.

>Jim: > I suppose the "continuative participle" is another way of saying the
>>  "present participle"?  I haven't seen any Pali term for this either.
>
>Eisel: No, it is supposedly a different participle; I can't quite
>figure it out, but I haven't spent much time on it yet.

My gut feeling here is that 'continuative' sounds like a linguistic
function rather than the designation of a particular form (at least
for Pali). Continuatives might possibly be expressed with present
participles.

By the way, Warder has 'missakiriyaa' in parentheses after 'present
participle' on page 46 of his _Introduction to Pali_. I don't know
where he found that term, as I haven't seen it in Sadd (yet). Anyone?


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

From Chatterji, Ksitish Chandra, _Technical Terms and Technique of
Sanskrit Grammar_, Calcutta, 1964: "The original name for lo.t
(Imperative) was lost in the Kaatantra school which uses pañcamii for
it, because lo.t occupies the fifth place in the Paaninian scheme of
moods and tenses if the Subjunctive, which is confined to Vedic, is
excluded." page 12.

"In the case of li.n (Potential) as in that of lo.t, the earlier name
was lost and li.n came to be called saptamii in the Kaatantra system,
as with the exlusion of the Vedic Subjecnctive, it occupied the
seventh place in the system of Paa.nini." page 13

To me the above makes good sense of the terms (which one might
abbreviate 5mi and 7mi), though I don't think it's certain that the
Paninian terms need to predate the Kaatantra terms, as Chatterji
assumes.

best regards,

/Rett