Re: Meeting with Peter Skilling; Lampang

Dear Tadao,

Thanks for describing the teaching milieu at that temple. I think all
of us on this group enjoy hearing about such experiences.

>As for memorization, I can still recall the first passage of
>Kaccaya, which I couldn't
>intrepret when I opened the book, dispite the fact that by then I
>had studied Pali for seven years.
>The incident was very much the beginning of my interest in
>Linguistics, which is now my profession.

If you have time, do you (or any list members) have any comments on
or corrections of the below? It's a working translation of the first
sutta (and vutti) of kaccaayana which I posted over on Yahoo-Pali to
kick off a little series of introductory lessons on traditional Pali
grammar. (of course, I'm the one that would need lessons) This
initial sutta is fairly straightforward, but many condensed,
perplexing, technical verses are coming soon after this one. I'm not
sure about 'phonemes' for akkharaa, but 'letters' and 'sounds' both
seem to miss part of the sense.


best regards,

/Rett


attho akkharasaññaato /1/

sabbavacanaana.m attho akkhareh' eva saññaayate / akkharavipattiya.m
hi atthassa dunnayataa hoti / tasmaa akkharakosalla.m bahuupakaara.m
suttantesu //

Translation:

1) Meaning is made intelligible through phonemes

The meaning of all statements is made intelligible only through the
phonemes. For when there is a mistake in the phonemes, the meaning is
hard to derive. Hence proficiency in phonemes is of great assistance
in the suttantas.

Notes:

I chose 'phonemes' here for akkharaa though it might have been
possible to translate as 'letters' or 'sounds' or even
'imperishables'. However since this rule applies equally well to
written as spoken statements I believe phoneme might be a defensible
choice. A phoneme is a morphological irreducible, the smallest
sense-distinguishing unit. Unlike English, Pali uses a phonemic
script, so letters and sounds correspond on a one-to-one basis to
each other.

akkharavipatti: I'm not sure if this means arranging the letters in
the wrong order, or failing to write or enunciate them legibly or
intelligibly, or  both.