That’s right, Bhante @sujato, undeterred (or enabled?) by pandemics and such, I persist on my quest to unravel the mysteries of the Bhikkhuni Patimokkha and Pali grammar, one declension at a time. Much gratitude to all the Bhantes/Ajahns who have kindly responded to my pressing question with edifying explanations and resources. Thank you also to Bhante Sujato for hospitably welcoming further questions of this nature on this discussion board. Be warned, you are offering a dangerous opening , as I am a bit of an endless fount of questions. But I guess you already know that. So, onwards ho!:
After poring over the various resources you pointed me towards (of which, for the greenies’ record I wish to point out I only photocopied one page of Margaret Cone’s PoD, which sadly does not seem to exist in digital format.), I have come to a better understanding of a number of things but still have a few questions.
First, though, to give credit where credit is due, when I had asked my Pali student sidekick Ven Upekkha about this puzzle (prior to seeking higher counsel at SC) she had already alerted me to ‘tissā’ in the pronouns table but we didn’t know what to do with it because I had thought aññamañña was an adjective, as was stated in its entry in Ven Buddhadatta’s CPED (see, Ajahn @Brahmali, you’re not the only one! I wanted to hand your sadface emoticon a Kleenex.)
Now, thanks to your revelations, I understand that añña is actually a pronoun, but a sort of multi-talented pronoun that can also act as an adjective.
My questions:
- When scouring the pronouns tables, how do you know which set of declensions more specialized pronouns like añña would follow, as they do not themselves feature in the tables?
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Warder p. 74 (thanks, Ven. Suñño) says that añña follows the ya(d) declension – but in his own ya(d) declension table (p. 70) there does not appear to be the issā ending in gen./dat. sg. f.
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Bhante Sujato and Ajahn Brahmali in their replies both seem happy to just harvest the issā ending from tissā in the ta(d) declensions in Ven. Nyanatusita’s tables and plug it into aññamañña (Cool, I didn’t know you could do that!)
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But Margaret Cone, in her entry on añña delineates the whole set of declensions specifically for añña where the issā ending shows up not only in gen./dat. but also instr. and loc. for sg. f. (she seems to have accidentally omitted abl.). This is similar to the pattern of declensions for ayam I found in another Pronouns Table (by anonymous, but more comprehensive than Ven Nyanatusita’s). Here, imissā appears in gen./dat., inst., abl., and loc. sg. f.
- For the example of aññamaññissā vajjappaṭicchādikā, it’s a moot point, because gen./dat. works. Although, the question then can become: is it gen. or dat.? CPD identifies it as gen. but in my mind, it could also work as a dat.
gen.: hiding each other*'s* faults
dat.: hiding faults for each other
Even if you have no hair, you can still like to split them.
- But these other case possibilities that Margaret Cone’s list shows might come into play if we look at another phrase in the vibhanga to this rule, ie. the word definition Bhikkhunisaṃghassavihesikā ti aññamaññissā kamme karīyamāne paṭikkosanti. Here, is aññamaññissā:
a) a locative and serves as an adjective agreeing with kamme karīyamāne which are also locative? (something like, they protest (patikkosanti) with regard to legal acts that are being carried it out against each other [a sort of similar reading to IB Horner] )
b) a dative pronoun, not adjective at all. I am guessing this is how Ajahn Brahmali might have arrived at his translation: “They protest on each other’s behalf (me: akin to ‘for each other’ ) when procedures are being carried out against them.”
- I digress. Back to aññamaññissā vajjappaṭicchādikā. In the bigger picture of the whole sentence of the rule, does aññamaññissā function:
a) as an adjective agreeing with vajjappaṭicchādikā, which is also an adjective ultimately modifying bhikkhuniyo as part of the string of adjectives pāpācārā, pāpasaddā, and pāpasilokā? I don’t see how this is possible because all the other words must agree with nom. pl. f. bhikkhuniyo while we have established that aññamaññissā is gen./dat. sg. f.
b) as a gen./dat. pronoun. period.
Basically, questions 3-4 are trying to clarify the concept of ‘pronominal adjectives’. Warder says “they function as both pronouns and adjectives.” Does this just mean that in some contexts they can be adjectives and in some contexts they can be purely a pronoun, not that they are somehow magically both at once? Can you think of an example where aññamañña serves as an adjective?
Can you just see the cogs of my brain slowly turn? Thank you for reading through this extremely detailed play-by-play of my process towards grasping this concept. Hopefully it will also be of benefit to other Pali students at a similar level!
Thank you very much if you are able to reply to at least some of this.
Very happy to know there is a place self-studying Pali orphans like us can go to for some informative gruel!
Within the space of two short paragraphs, I utterly contradict myself. First I call it an adjective, and then a noun, which makes me look for the ending in the noun table. But the form -issā is there in the pronoun table, just as one would expect with these “pronominal adjectives”.
