Re: passage from Cūḷaniddesa

Thanks a lot for your replies. Jim’s reply helped confirm my sense that these peculiar, probably onomatopoeic words were not really much part of the Pāli literary vocabulary. Bryan’s reply helped me understand how to find out what they might have meant in their original linguistic context, through using wider resources. I’m left with a sense that we may no longer be able to understand these words in the Cūḷaniddesa except through the kind of intelligent guesswork or reconstruction that Bryan suggests. I am puzzled however how musical instruments played with the mouth are examples of ‘verbal play’ (vācasikā khiḍḍā), as they are not examples of speech, like making jokes, but rather examples of sounds. Perhaps this is to say that vācasika can mean simply ‘connected with sound’ as well as 'connected with speech’ (i.e. ‘verbal’).