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The first lesson will be conducted on Jitsi. This is an online video calling service similar to Zoom, which we have used for our talks for the past several years. You do not need an account, nor do you need to download or install anything.
Just click this link:
In class, always keep your video on, unless there are connectivity problems
Make sure you unmute your mic before speaking
In the first class we will cover chapter 1 of Warder. You are expected to have completed the preliminary work as set out in the course outline.
Each week I will assign the next chapter of Warder as homework. Thus you will read the chapter, master the grammar, learn the vocabulary, and complete all the exercises before the class. In class, I will review the content and discuss any questions you raise about the chapter.
I will require that every student states in the chat that they have completed the course work for the previous week. If you have not completed it, you must say you have not completed it. There are no exceptions: this is not a class where anyone can sit in the back without participating.
In addition, during the class I will ask students at random to answer questions, so be prepared.
If you find that you are not able to keep up with the coursework, then this is not the course for you. We understand: life is demanding, dogs eat homework, and Pali is hard. Not a problem, just let us know on email if you cannot continue the class.
I have been reviewing Warder myself for this class, and am already learning (or relearning) things. I look forward to embarking on this journey with you.
Thanks for the lesson tonite. I actually enjoyed the pronunciation practice and the lesson, and thank you for answering (almost) all of the questions.
I didnât have too many problems with the audio, but sometimes it went a bit âblurryâ but thatâs okay. Not sure my voice came through during the speakalong, I didnât hear myself but perhaps that is normal.
PS - I forgot that hoti was irregular, thank you anyway for clarifying.
PPS - Unfortunately I wonât be able to make next weekâs class, my apologies (itâs my birthday and apparently plans are afoot âŠ) but I will try and make the remaining classes.
I hope this is the right thread for asking questions.
Here is my first question.
Bhante, or anyone else on the class who is more advanced than myself: can you shed some light on the different verb conjugation groups? Is there a grammar guide that explain this further? Most books I have read (eg. Duroiselle) just gives the conjugation rules for each group and a list of verbs that are in the groups.
Are there any reason, meaning or guidelines as to how words are assigned to conjugation groups? Is it based on sound (Pali is a verbal language), root endings (consonant/vowel), root meaning, topic, or is it just random?
Is there also a way of determining which conjugation group a word should belong in, just by looking at the root? Although Warder is initially carefully about telling us which conjugation group a word belongs in, he kind of gives up later on and just list words so I am left guessing which group they belong to.
I noticed words in a conjugation group tend to share word endings, but roots with the same ending letter can be assigned to different groups. There is also one root (dÄ) that belongs in two conjugation groups (1st group division 4 where it becomes dadÄti and 7th group where it becomes deti) but it is effectively the same word and different variants are chosen for the various tenses/inflections.
It seems to me there may be a commonality between words in a conjugation group, but my poor brain canât figure it out. Or maybe I am over-reaching.
@kora, maybe this is a question you can ask ChatGPT? Iâll be fascinated to see if it can be trained to look at words in the same conjugation group, look at their usage in the Tipitaka, and see if it can spot any patterns.
By the way, class, I would recommend reading the preface to Warder. I found it helpful since it details his intentions, methodologies, or how we should treat his book in order to learn.
I donât think we ever need to to this, because we wonât come across pure roots in texts. We will only find inflected verbs.
The way I understand it, roots are artificial concepts by grammarians which were in a way âinventedâ by backward reasoning (âthe forms of this verb have such and such in common, so we can derive this rootâ).
I think it will be best to learn the 3rd person singular form of verbs and if we want, we can learn the root on the side, not putting too much emphasis on it.
Sadly, we do need to know the roots. From Lesson 4 onwards, you will find some of the tenses/types of verbs are based on the root (eg. aorist, which is introduced in that lesson) and others (eg. imperative), are based on the âpresent stemâ, which is what we learnt in Lesson 1.
If you donât know the roots, you are forced to learn each word multiple times (in all the different tenses and conjugations). You also need to learn to recognise the verb in its many conjugations, and not knowing the root will make it that much harder, since all the conjugations are ultimately derived from the root.
Knowing the root also gives you the ability to sometimes âguessâ or infer the meaning of new words based on the same root but a different prefix (although this sometimes doesnât work). For example, vadati means âspeakâ and abhivadeti means âgreet or saluteâ (both based on the root vad). Another example: veáčheti means wrap and nibbeáčheti (both based on veáčh) means âuntwistâ or âunravelâ. Thereâs a whole bunch of words based on pad and kam but with different prefixes that are kind of related to each other.
Warner also gets lazy in the latter chapters and gives words in a non present tense (eg. bhinna in Lesson 11 page 64 which means âdivided, splitâ) but he doesnât give you the present equivalent, so you are left to figure out how to construct the present from the root which is bhin. And to do that, you need to know the conjugation group so you can apply the right rules (Warder doesnât tell us). Hence my question.
I guess I can retrieve word info from PtS dict and examples from Tipitaka and ask ChatGPT to find some patterns. But I am away from home, so I donât have good pali book to help me do the work properly. I canât remember much of these conjugation groups, beyond bhĆ« being the first one. haha
For something more basic, here is my chatlog while I read lesson #1 and discuss with ChatGPT to check its understanding and even clarify my understanding.
I just wanted to follow up on the lesson from Tuesday, I felt that I wasnât able to give the clarity that yâall deserved, because of internet, and also just adjusting the presentation for the format. Iâll try to improve as we go along. Normally the internet here is not great (thanks NBN!). I dropped out while speaking at another important meeting yesterday, so itâs not just you! But last Tuesday was particularly bad, iâm not sure why, but both my phone and wifi were terrible.
I think weâll continue with Jitsi for the next class. After that, Deepika will return from SL and weâll have the option of switching to Zoom if we like. Donât imagine that Zoom will solve our problems, though, no service can work if the internet is no good. If next week is still buggy, Iâll look at wifi alternatives.
Iâll be making a new thread for each class, so look for the next thread if you want to discuss issues with lesson 2.
Happy birthday Christie! Here, have some cake
Nice, thanks! Iâll make a list of resources for the course and add this to it.
Donât worry, stick to learning lesson by lesson. Donât jump ahead! Once weâve covered the classes in order, some of these questions will be answered, others will be answerable.
If youâve done the lesson and have more time to give, I would recommend memorizing prose suttas rather than going too hard on grammar.
Indeed, yes.
Not really. I donât know the conjugation group, but the verb is bhindati. How? I just know. The most important thing is reading and comprehension. Grammar is there to assist when that doesnât work. (Oh, and BTW the root is bhid.) NGL, I rarely look at conjugations when working out verbal forms. Mostly the endings are all you need, and the knowledge of verbal groups and the like comes through familiarity.
Another super-useful tool is the Digital Pali Dictionary. I use it all the time, and it usually gives these details. Iâll post about it in the upcoming âresourcesâ thread.
Iâm reviewing the first class and having a hard time understanding the process of strengthening vowels in the derivation of present tense verb stems.
Just a reminder, Vowel Gradation is a general phonetic phenomena in Pali. We happen to be learning it in the context of first conjugation verbs, but this is just one of many places it can be observed. Vowel Gradation is, in and of itself, meaningless, it is purely a change in the phonetics. In fact we do similar things in English. Consider the initial vowel in âchildâ as compared with âchildrenâ. In this irregular plural, the vowel is weakened from ai to i. We pronounce the difference, but donât spell it. In Pali, itâs always spelled out.
The usefulness of Vowel Gradation is that it helps us recognize the different forms of words. Sometimes these indicate meaningful grammatical changes (the concrete noun mitta âfriendâ becomes the abstract noun mettÄ âfriendlinessâ), sometime they indicate words with distinct meanings (bhava is âexistenceâ while bhÄva is âstateâ), and other times they are simply variant spellings (eg. viriya vs. vÄ«riya).
What is âthe compound vowel nearest in place of articulationâ (referred to in page10)?
Go back to the table of letters in the Introduction. The places of articulation are on the left: back of the throat, roof of the mouth, etc. Each has a set of consonants associated with it, and also a set of vowels. The consonants b, bh, p, ph for example are labial, pronounced with the lips, and the semi-vowel v (or w) is articulated as the same place, as are the vowels u and o.
(I have a meeting, Iâll get to the rest of the questions soon.)
What is closer to what in the Vowel Gradation diagram? Is this the same as the rule expressed in page 10? (i becomes e, and u becomes o, etc. which means that e is like i with a prefixed a, and o is like an u with a prefixed a⊠did I get it right?)
And why in the case of bhavati the Ć« in the root was strengthened, but it was lengthened in bhÄveti (examples given in page 12).
Hi @bran, I didnât reply on this yesterday, but it is good advice.I wanted some time to reflect and ponder on the implications on my learning of Pali.
One of the things I took from Warderâs preface is that, unlike some other textbooks and grammar guides, Warder teaches grammar from the âclassical Paliâ perspective (he specifically refers to providing âa grammar of Pali in its ancient phaseâ) rather than adhering to modern grammar and linguistics.
More specifically, a lot of the grammar in Warder comes from the " KaccaÌyanabyaÌkaranÌŁamÌŁ" - the oldest extant Pali grammar.
From there, i received the understanding that the word vyÄkaraáčaáč does not exactly translate to grammar in English. As the 19th century Sri Lankan scholar bhikkhu SubhuÌti explains
VyaÌkaranÌŁa is the science of writing and speaking a language without fault and of understanding the intentions of texts by knowing all the divisions and syntactic relations of a languageâs expressions.
So it is not a pure book about grammar but a mixture of syntax, morphology, grammar but also semantics, with a focus on syntax production rules.
So the verb conjugation groups are mainly syntax rules, there is no semantic meaning associated with them.
Interestingly (my speculation, not explicitly stated in the book), Pali cases may also be more syntactic rather than semantic. Or, at least, there are two âaspectsâ of cases - one syntactic, and one semantic, and they are referred to using different terms in classical Pali grammar.
Syntactic cases are given numbers: paáčhamÄ (first), dutiyÄ (second), etc. Much like the verb conjugation groups. These are just syntax production rules, governing how the nouns are inflected. There is no number associated with vocative, because vocative is just the noun stem uninflected.
Then, each numbered syntactic case is âassociatedâ with a semantic case, named paccattavacana (nominative), Ämantaáčavacana (accusative) and so on.
The important insight and âa haâ moment for me is that the association between syntactic case and semantic case is strong but by no means fixed in concrete. And this explains places in the suttas when a word is inflected in one case but the semantic usage is that of another case - this happens more often than I would have thought, and itâs not just because itâs a mistake in the text - itâs sometimes used for emphatic or stylistic reasons.
Hence the reason why genitive and dative cases share the same inflections - over time the the 6th form of case inflections have gradually been used for both semantic cases.
Warder confuses between syntactic and semantic cases by conflating them using European grammar classifications.
Warder also âincorrectlyâ (in my opinion) refers to nipÄta as âindeclinableâ whereas itâs probably better described as âparticleâ. There are also different types of nipÄta which Warder doesnât fully explain.
Hence his rather confusing and inconsistent explanations of the yena ⊠tena construction - he refers to the indeclinable yena governing the use of the nominative noun on page 14 but then on page 73 he refers to it as an âinstrumentalâ.
A much simpler explanation is if we regard this as a syntactic rule: the yena ⊠tena construction requires the noun to be inflected in the 1st case form, just like when you quote a word.
On a different note, the enclitic me is much easier to understand if we regard it as an undeclinable that can be associated with three different semantic cases, rather than irregular inflections of the various syntactic cases.
So, anyway, to cut a long story short, I think if we were to continue studying Pali using Warder, it would be helpful to think of the grammar from a classical perspective rather than from a modern perspective. For this reason, I am going to try to learn and use the Pali terminology rather than the English, to avoid further confusion.
For example, I am going to internally think of gender using the Pali names pulliáč ga, itthiliáč ga, napuáčsakaliáč ga rather than masculine, feminine and neuter. This helps me to understand that a single noun can be inflected using multiple genders. For example kumÄra can be inflected as kumÄro as well as kumÄrÄ«, used to denote masculine and feminine versions of the noun.
Sorry for the long and somewhat rambling post. I am documenting it more to clarify my thoughts rather than imposing my opinions on others. Feel free to completely disregard this post and follow your own path.
I pretty much came to the same conclusion in my deep dive in classical Pali grammar yesterday. The verb conjugation groups are pretty much syntactic.
And thank you for correcting my spelling mistake for the root bhid! Thatâs what happens when I type fast rather than copy and paste.
Iâve decided my focus is on being able to read Pali, and not really on the ability to write Pali, so Iâve decided to âlet it goâ and be relaxed (upekkha) about the syntax production rules in classical Pali grammar.
Yep, thatâs exactly it. The main thing to remember is that in certain situations, vowels can strengthen along the given axis. Mostly youâll just need to recognize that they are, in fact, different phonetic values for the same thing (eg. bhavati and hoti).
But in some cases youâll need to dig down to understand why the difference is there. An example would be in the often-subtle indications of the difference between the name of the place and the name of the people who live in that place. The people of Videha are called Vedehi, for example. See too the Jina (i.e. Mahavira) whose followers are called Jaina (thatâs a Sanskritic form, where the dipthong remains; it doesnât seem to occur in Pali, but would probably be Jena). (These construction are secondary derivation, which is a later topic.)
In this case the âlengtheningâ (i.e. one more step on the gradation) is meaningful, as it indicates a causal verb. Bhavati = âone isâ, bhÄveti = âone makes it become (more)â, i.e. âdevelopsâ. But causal verbs come much later!
In Lesson 1 Warder gives the word upasaáčkamati (to approach).
In the dictionary (in PTS at least) - I canât find it with this spelling, but instead there is upasaáčkamati with áč.
Is it just that there are various spellings for the same word?
This is discussed briefly in p. 4 of Warderâs Introduction, on the ânasalâ, and the first footnote on that page.
Before the gutteral consonants (k, kh, g, gh), the nasal sound is spelled áč . In Romanized Pali we typically spell such conjuncts as áč k, áč g, and so on.
However the sound is exactly the same as áč. It is technically possible to spell the same words áčk, áčg. Thus sometimes you might see saáčgha instead of saáč gha.
The specific nasal sounds that correspond to the relevant place of articulation are each spelled differently (áč k, ñc, áčáč, nt, mp), and in theory are pronounced differently, but in reality we just pronounce them that way because theyâre a nasal before a consonant: itâs just kind of how the sound comes out, you donât think about it.
Usually modern editions will specify the correct nasal before the consonant. Manuscripts, however, are inconsistent, so youâll want to get used to seeing both forms.
* The â-ishâ is because you seem to have spelled it incorrectly. Itâs not áč but áč . Is this just a typo, or is it a mistake in the dictionary?
Bhante , regarding memorization. I have pseudo-memorized some devotion chants and also anatthalakkhana sutta and aditta pariyaya sutta. And I wonder about âmemorization techniquesâ.
So far I just chant it along with a youtube video and once I do that several times it starts to get imprinted on the memory but I wonder, given that the tradition is heavily oral there must be âtechniquesâ or âtips and tricksâ.
For example: sometimes I wonder if repeating little sections a lot on a single sitting is better than the whole sutta all the time. in that case, I also wonder how many repetitions is enough.
And, are there any resources for studying the techniques of the oral recitations and their mnemonic strategies?
Thanks a lot, very interesting chat session, and one that shows the potential as well as the limitations of ChatGPT.
I guess one of the issues is that there isnât a lot of literature on the conjugation groups - Warder is one of the few that even mentions them. And the grammar books like Duroiselle donât really explain them. So I am not surprised ChatGPT would focus more on the inflectional endings based on person (vibhatti).
Maybe you have to train it explicitly with the conjugation groups, supply a set of roots belonging to each conjugation group, then ask it to determine if there are any commonality across sentences that use verbs in a specific conjugation group.
Duroiselle has the list of conjugation groups and common words in each. Iâve been told someone has compiled a list of all 1700 roots and which conjugation group they fall into, but I havenât been able to track it down.
When I was a young monk, I memorized the patimokkha in seven weeks, and in addition, memorized dozens of suttas in Pali. Hereâs how I did it.
Each day, learn a new passage. Usually a few sentences. Go over them phrase by phrase, then sentence by sentence until they are completely fluent. Be sure to be precise in pronunciation.
Learn the grammar and vocabulary of the Pali as you go, so it is meaningful.
Then, each day, recite by heart all that has been learned up till then, plus the new passages.
Donât stop before you finish! You will not come back and learn it again later!
When finished, recite the whole piece by heart every day for a significant period (for patimokkha, I did it every day for a year.)
When you stop reciting it every day, come back to it every week or so.
I found that the best posture for learning was walking. I would take the text for learning onto the walking path and chant there. Something about the rhythm helped reinforce learning.
Reciting alongside a clip or something is fine, but as quickly as you can, graduate to chanting purely by sight-reading.
, regarding memorization. I have pseudo-memorized some devotion chants and also anatthalakkhana sutta and aditta pariyaya sutta. And I wonder about âmemorization techniquesâ.