Re: Iti & ti

Hi Eisel and group,

>Although I would agree (in theory) with Dr. Pind's suggestion that
>_'ti_ sometimes behaves like an enclitic particle (and sometimes does
>not) I must observe that this is the kind of fine (theoretical)
>distinction that was probably not understood for two thousand years of
imperfect transmission (if ever).

I would think that these sorts of 'fine distinctions' are the bread and butter of ordinary language use, and that they are routinely employed by language users apart from whether or not they are consciously aware of them.

It's easy enough to find examples of this in Pali. For instance the present tense is used in narrative prose in the sense of the past (historical present), but only to express repeated or ongoing actions, or general states of affairs. Never to express a single completed action that took place in the past. For that the text switches to finite past tense forms or past participles. (a similar pattern can be observed in the Sanskrit Hitopade´sa, I believe). AFAIK this is the case both in canonical prose and in commentarial narratives such as the Dhammapadaat.thakathaa. Yet is this distinction theoretically described in the grammars? I don't know of it being so (though I'd be very interested in hearing about it if it is described somewhere in the vyakarana literature).

In any case, this 'fine distinction' appears to have been learned, used and understood unconsciously by good writers of Pali, entirely apart from what they could learn from studying grammar books. They must have either picked it up from reading models of good prose, or carried it over from other languages (sanskrit or their vernaculars).


> the mixed history
>in which a more prakritic _itti_ once played a part,

I still don't understand how anything we have seen so far implies that there ever was a prakritic form _itti_ of the word _iti_. There could have been an /-i tti/, equivalent to /-a tii/, /-e tti/, /-u tti/ and so forth.

From the discussion so far and what I've found in Woolner and Pischel it appears that the prakritic /tti/ arose from a situation where the initial /i/ in iti is elided because the preceding word ends in a vowel. If initial unaccented vowels are elided after the final vowel of a preceding word two things typically happen to preserve metrical length. Either the final vowel of the preceding word is lengthened (as with Pali /ti/), or the vowel remains short but the following consonant is doubled (as in Prakrit /tti/). These are just basically equivalent accomadations, and they don't require the previous existence of a full form /itti/ in order to occur. Please correct me if this is mistaken.


best regards,

/Rett