Re: Iti & ti

Hi Rett,

> I would think that these sorts of 'fine distinctions' are the bread and butter of ordinary language use...
> It's easy enough to find examples of this in Pali. For instance the present tense is used in narrative prose ...

I think that a linguist with your training would agree that this is a
wildly spurious example to demonstrate a tenuously related point
--however inherently interesting the expression of historical
narrative voice may be.  My claim was only that there was not a
theoretical awareness of the distinction (re: the inconsistently
enclitic status of "iti"); I rather presupposed that you (and
everyone) already accepted that there are lingual distinctions (in
praxis) that are not articulated in theory --and what we were
discussing was but one such example.  However, when & where this is
the case, we can't infer very much from errors and inconsistencies
(Pali studies have a long history of drawing wild conclusions from
minor variations in spelling and syntax ... witness the drama of
"Magadhisms" in the AP:Kv, etc.) --and I was simply cautioning the
readers of the list that the behaviour of (enclitic) _'ti_ described
could not be readily parlayed into an "historically descriptive model"
(to paraphrase your earlier query, Rett).

>. AFAIK this is the case both in canonical prose and in commentarial
narratives such as the Dhammapadaat.thakathaa.

I truly hope that "AFAIK" is a loan-word from Avestan, as I cannot
find it in the index to Pischel.

(That was a joke)

> 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/).

Thus the ambiguity: given that early written Pali did not distinguish
double consonants or long vowels in its orthography, "iiti" vs. "itti"
may well have been resolved in subsequent spelling reforms, i.e., the
amendment of the canon to suit the new orthography.  Thus, like K.R.
Norman's example of "Brahma" vs. "Bahama" we may have a case of a
deleted Prakritic element of the language in the reduplication of "t"
in "itti".

I had rather thought that the point of Bhante Nyanatusita's initial
query was to point out the strangeness of the Pali usage of the
particle relative to what we know about the Prakrit --and this seems
to me to be some small part of the explanation.

I agree that this is "no big deal", and my previous two messages began
with the statement that I thought sufficient had been said about the
issue already; thus, I agree with Rett & Pind now that there is little
more that can/should be said.

E.M.