Hi @Gillian. Thanks for your support, but no, my suggestion was not very sensible as it turns out. Bhante is right that the Zoom itself is running on central servers, so Bhante’s poor connection only affects him dropping in and out, which, of course, is not ideal if one is the teacher! So, the only solution is he needs a better connection where he is residing for the rains or the ability to decamp every Tuesday evening to somewhere that can provide that.
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I think I should be able to do that, a supporter has offered the use of his office in nearby Parramatta, which, fingers crossed, will have better support.
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Question re direct and indirect objects
samaṅaṃ atthaṃ pucchāmi = “I ask the philosopher/ascetic the meaning”
Can we put it as a rule that the first object in a sentence is the indirect object and the second object is the direct object? In other words, the noun nearest to the verb is the direct object?
I’m not sure. It seems plausible, but I would always rely on context.
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Is this correct, ka?
He gives alms to the ascetic = samaṇaṃ piṇḍaṃ deti
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Sure, that’s correct!
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Question regarding the exercise:
- samaṇo āgacchati = The philosopher is coming.
Question: Can it be present perfect tense here? (present indicative can be used to talk about a past event that is recent?) → The ascetic has arrived.
- vādaṃ vadanti = They speak (state) an argument.
Question: Can it be: They give a statement/They have a debate?
- puttā pabbajanti = The sons go forth.
Question: Can it be: They ordain their sons?
- satto tiṭṭhati = The being stays.
Question: Can it be: A being exists/A creature stands/A creature remains (there?)?
Thank you, ka.
P.S. I’ve got the answers from Ajahn Brahmali’s course on Wisdom and Wonders website.
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Typically we would use the past participle for this, samaṇo āgato.
“give a statement”, yes that would be fine. “Have a debate”, hmm maybe, but I don’t think so. Normally there would a distinct expression of the different parties debating, as in the opening lines of Snp 4.3.
No, “sons” here is nominative, so they perform the action of the verb.
“They ordain their sons” would be putte pabbajanti.
Stands or remains, yes. “exists” would usually be expressed with bhavati or atthi.
Good questions, keep them coming!
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LOL! How could I miss it!!! (Answer: Easily!) 
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Thank you for the explanation, ka.
Well, yes, more will be coming. You know me – I ask a lot of questions. Not many monks can tolerate me, except your kindest teacher - Ajahn Chatchai, the most patient and kindest monk in Thailand! 
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Dear Bhante @sujato do you have any further thoughts and hints on the importance of learning roots + prefixes and how to integrate this topic in the process of learning Pali?
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I don’t mean to usurp Bhante’s reply, which will be much better than mine, but the following page from Kaccāyana illustrates that if you know the meaning of the 20 or so prefixes, and the meaning of the root, you can deduce the meaning for a whole bunch of words with prefixes on the root. For example hara (carrying):
- pahāro-carrying (instruments of harm) specially, i.e. beating, striking. [pa-specially+hara-carrying+ṇa-suffix]
- parābhavo-loss, ruin. [parā-opposite+bhava-to be, being=ruin, loss]
- nihāro, nīhāro-taking out, evicting. [ni-out+hara-carrying] (Both ni and nī are the same)
- uhāro-carrying up. [u-up+hara-carrying]
- duhāro-carrying badly. [du-bad+hara-carrying]
- saṁhāro-carrying well. [saṁ-well+hara-carrying]
- vihāro-carrying one’s body specially, staying. [vi-specially+hara-carrying. i.e. act of staying at a place using alternating bodily modes]
- avahāro-carrying in a mean manner, i.e. stealing. [ava-lowly,contemptuous, mean+hara-carrying]
- anuhāro-carrying accordingly. [anu-following, subsequent+hara-carrying]
- parihāro-carrying from all around. [pari-all around+hara-carrying]
- adhihāro-carrying nicely. [adhi-specially, nicely+hara-carrying]
- abhihāro-carrying toward. [abhi-toward+hara-carrying]
- patihāro-carrying again. [pati-again+hara-carrying]
- suhāro-carrying well. [su-well+hara-carrying]
- āhāro-carrying toward, food or meal. [ā-toward+hara-carrying]
- atihāro-carrying beyond or excessively. [ati-beyond, excessive+hara-carrying]
- apihāro-carrying down. [api-downward+hara-carrying]
- apahāro-carrying outward, i.e. removing. [apa-out, away+hara- carrying]
- upahāro-carrying toward proximity, bringing up closer. [upa-near, close to+hara-carrying, complementary gift etc.]
Altogether there are around 1700 roots in Pali, so knowing 1700 roots and 20 prefixes gives a vocabulary exceeding 34,000 words. Of course, not all of them will have a clear meaning, so you may need to look up a dictionary, but you get a sense of what that word is all about.
I think it’s similar to the situation with Traditional Chinese and Japanese (I think Simplified Chinese may have destroyed this) where if you know all the radicals and sound components, you can have a sense of what a character means and how it should be pronounced by looking up the left and right components.
Thank you very much for this clarification @christie. This makes perfectly sense for me and motivates me further to invest some time in memorizing prefixes and roots.
In your example list I found an irregularity tough. You quoted a composition with “bhavo” which is another root (“bhu”) than “hr”, or did I get something wrong?
Good spot. Probably me making a mistake by being overzealous with the copy and paste.
I probably won’t go overboard with memorising the prefixes and roots. They are useful to know, but it’s like learning a language by reading a dictionary - I know a few people who tried doing that. They end up knowing a lot of uncommon words, but it takes a long time.
I prefer to learn just by encountering words as I read text, and eventually hopefully my mind will remember the ones that come up more often. I find the transformation rules from root to stem to conjugation/declension highly complex and confusing - there are so many of them and almost impossible to memorise all of them!
I don’t think I’ll ever end up being fluent in Pali (although it will be a nice party trick if I did) but that’s okay. As long as I am able to read the key suttas in the Pali canon I will die happy.
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Not really, we’ll cover prefixes in due course. Meanwhile, just focus on the verbal roots and the inflected verb forms and don’t worry too much about the process of conjugation that gets you from one to the other.
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I have question regarding the following verbs please:
gacchati: From the root gam, we have the consonant m, then we add the consonant ch to it, so we have the “assimilation”: m+ch > cch. My question is, where does this ch (from the left side) come from? If we use m+th > tth, we will have something like gatthati (not found in dictionary) right, why we didn’t do so?
tiṭṭhati: In Warder’s book, it says this is a “reduplicated” of the root (ṭ)ṭhā. If we do the so called reduplication, we should have something like: ṭhāṭhā. I don’t understand how can it go from ṭhāṭhā into tiṭṭhā? Is taṭṭhā or thiṭṭha not good?
dadāti: Similar to the above rule of “reduplicated root”, this time the root is dā. I don’t understand how can it go from dādā into dadā? This time, it further confuses me because I was expecting something like dadati, not dadāti.
dadāti: This is another question about the 3rd person plural present tense for this verb, I was expecting something like dadānti but it turns out to be dadanti. Meanwhile, we have the usual conjugation: dadāmi, dadāma, dadāsi, dadātha, dadāti.
pajahati: Similar to the above rule of “reduplicated root”, this time the root is hā. I don’t understand how can it go from hāhā into jahā?
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It’s irregular, so I don’t know and you don’t need to. 
What I can say is that it’s super-old: the form gaccha is found in the Rig Veda:
gaccha pṛthivīṃ “go to the earth”
giriṃ gaccha “go to the hill”
gaccha parastaram “go to the far shore”
gṛhān gaccha “go home”
gacchāmitrān (may the arrow) “go to the enemy”
So you’d probably have to dig down into Proto-Indo-European to uncover the phonetic details that led to this change.
Again, it’s irregular. You just have to learn these one by one. They are very common verbs, you’ll pick them up in no time.
This is the so-called “law of morae”. We can express this law like this. Assume that in Pali, a consonant and a short vowel have a (rhythmic) quantity of one, while a long vowel is two.
- A syllable never* has a quantity greater than three.
In the case of dadanti, if the second syllable was dān, it would be 1 + 2 + 1 = 4. This breaks the law of morae, so the vowel is contracted.
A simpler way to think of it is that you can’t have a long vowel before a double consonant. Even a vowel that is inherently long (o and e) is pronounced short.
* There are rare exceptions, eg. brāhmaṇa, where the initial syllable has a quantity of 1 + 1 + 2 + 1 = 5. But such forms are, as in this case, “sanskritic” imports perhaps best understood as loan words.
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Thank you Bhante for your detailed answer 
. I have learnt again new things. 
I was thinking “okay those verbs are irregular because they have to go through the procedure of reduplication, that’s why I tried to understand that process of reduplication. However, as it turns out, the procedure of reduplication is also irregular by itself 
”
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Yes, here it is, although we shall learn later some contexts where reduplication is regular (eg. “desiderative reduplication” where the reduplication indicates a desire for the thing.)
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