Complete Pali-English Dictionary for Development of Interlinear Suttas

How would I know that Sutam is an inflected form? Is there a brief lesson in Pali that would give me the information that I need to work on the dictionary for the interlinear suttas?

It can be found in the Pali-English Dictionary.

Unfortunately I do not have the ability to explain to you in English.

I just use the English dictionary and Google translator.

Please Ask LXNDR and sujato.

Can you tell us some more about the project you’re doing? Maybe we can help if we understand it better.

But as for your question, to understand the various declined forms of Pali words is no simple matter. Even common words like “is” and “do” appear in many different forms, some of which are very hard to recognize without a reasonable knowledge of Pali. In addition words frequently appear in compounds, where both the word itself and the function within the compound can be tricky.

There was thread here some time ago about different online resources for learning Pali. For myself, the best introduction for absolute beginners is Rune Johansson’s “Pali Buddhist Texts Explained for the Beginner”.

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@ElissaJ
Here are some links for learning a bit about Pali:
http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/pali.html

The Pali Primer by Lily de Silva is very basic and simplistic, But it can be a good start for learning some of the very basics about grammar, so you might learn how to begin to recognize some of the inflected forms. It has brief lessons and exercises. It’s available on-line.

Hi.

So to explain more… I’d like to be able to do something very similar to what is done here:

http://www.scripture4all.org/OnlineInterlinear/OTpdf/gen1.pdf

I am about ready to give up, though, for lack of a dictionary. I don’t think I have the ability to learn Pali enough to create a dictionary. Right now, I was trying to find a translation for the word “sattānaṃ”. The only resource I have that has that word in it is the Digital Pali Reader, which translates it as 7. But clearly in the English translations, it is translated as 4. (Looking at MN 10, the 4 foundations of mindfulness)

I would like to have it in a web page and searchable, so when I see a Pali word that I want clarification on, I can search for that word and find it in context, both interlinear and a more readable English translation.

I would like for there to be an option to pull up various lengths of text surrounding that word. So it could list either single sentences, or say, 1 sentence out which would list the sentence before and after as well as the sentence containing the word. And then you could pull up the whole Sutta.

So, it’s about understanding the meaning of the words based on the context of the use of that word throughout the text. Then this would help to get a wider view all together.

I am really curious about how a word could mean both 7 and 4. Maybe the one that translates it as 7 is just completely wrong?

in MN 10 it’s actually a declined form of the word meaning creatures

see meaning 2 at SuttaCentral

satta-creature is declined as sattānaṃ in Gen/Dat case

while

satta-seven - as sattannaṃ

i don’t think the technology is yet advanced enough to automagically parse any lexical unit in order to extract the base word and thus its meaning or derive the meaning on the basis of the unit’s grammatical attributes so there’s no way round doing some chunk of work by hand which in turn requires a degree of knowledge in grammar

Suttacentral’s embedded Pali-English dictionary does is quite successfully but still not in 100%, and the word sattānaṃ falls exactly within those remaining percentages which it cannot parse either

many word forms of the Biblical Hebrew text too are not to be found in the dictionary, because they’re inflected like לְמִינֵהוּ, דְמוּתֵנוּ, זַרְעוֹ and especially the verbs

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Hi. Thanks. I really appreciate your time and patience with my questions.

I don’t know what you mean by “declined form of the word…” What is a declined form of a word?

Just to note that there is no AI that can do this 100% even in English. Natural language processing has proven to be one of the hardest fields of computing: we all know how strange the results of Google translate can be. The basic reason for this is that deep language knowledge requires an understanding of the nuances of context, and no-one realy has any idea how to program this.

Hi Elissa,

It seems we have similar problems! When I started learning Pali I really had no idea what most of the grammatical forms meant, so I had to go back and learn the basic terms and concepts before I could start to make sense of the Pali.

In this case, “declension” basically refers to the way that words take on different forms in different grammatical cases. For example in English we have “car” for singular and “cars” for plural. These are both “declined” forms of the basic word “car”. Or to put it another way, the words as listed in a dictionary are abstractions derived from the way that words actually appear in language.

Pali is much more heavily declined than English, so it’s important to be able to recognize the different forms of a word, and what function they play in a sentence. You can read more about declension on Wikipedia.

The meaning of the word can be varied, depending on the context.

upapatti: 1. birth, rebirth, (literal(ly). attainment) ; Dh 419 (sattānaṁ), etc.

*Example of Pali dictionary. : Ayaṁ=> (imesaṁ sattānaṁ “creatures like us”).

satta+ānaṁ

Satta2: 1. (m.) a living being, creature, a sentient & rational being, a person

genitive. dative. plural. Masculine. feminine. neuter. ānaṃ
accusative. Singular. Masculine. ānaṃ

This article used the Google translator English dictionary.

Sorry, but this seems to me to be misleading.

means:

The word upapatti means “birth, rebirth”, for example, the rebirth “of sentient beings” (= sattānaṁ)

As @LXNDR mentioned earlier, depending on context, satta means either “seven” or “being”, usually in the sense of “sentient being”.

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Possibility to vary with the context is not want to give up.

I complement to the wrong part of the answer.

I “from DN22” “The sattānaṃ” translated the sentence containing the word

I’m just guessing the possibility of sattānaṃ.

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Yā tesaṃ tesaṃ sattānaṃ(ṁ) tamhi tamhi sattanikāye jāti sañjāti okkanti abhinibbatti khandhānaṃ pātur-bhāva āyatana+ānaṃ paṭilābho, ayaṃ vuccati, bhikkhave, jāti.

Yanti is 3rd plural. present. of : see yāti
Yāti => is yāyati(see yāti)
Yāyati see yāti.
Yāti: to go,go on,to proceed,to go away

tesaṁ tesaṁ: this(genitive.) that(genitive.)
ta°=> genitive. tesaṁ, f. tāsaṁ
*compare: singular. masculine. neuter. genitive. dative. tesaṁ
*Please see.: ta°=> II. Application: this, that, just this (or that), even this (or these). etc.

upapatti: 1. birth, rebirth, (lit. attainment) ; etc… Dh 419 (sattānaṁ),
Satta2: 1. (m.) a living being, creature
*compare: genitive. dative. plural. Masculine. feminine. neuter. ānaṃ
*compare: accusative. Singular. Masculine. ānaṃ

tamhi tamhi: this(locative.) that(locative.)
ta°=> locative. tasmiṁ (J i.278), tamhi (Dh 117)
*compare: masculine. neuter. singular. locative. tamhi
*compare: masculine. neuter. plural. locative. ehi.
*compare: masculine. neuter. plural. instrumental. ablative. ehi.
*Please see.: ta°=> II. Application: this, that, just this (or that), even this (or these). etc.

Jantu 1 => (=satta, nara, puggala); (=sattanikāya, people, a crowd

Jāti: 1. birth, rebirth, possibility of rebirth, etc

Sañjāti: birth, origin; outcome; produce

Okkanti]: entry (lit. descent), appearance, coming to be.

Abhinibbatti: becoming, birth, rebirth

khandha=> Thus the variant phases of life in transmigration are defined as— jāti… maraṇaṁ…etc
khandha=> kh°anaṁ udaya — vyaya (or udayabbaya) the rising and passing of the kh.,transmigration
udaya -vyaya = °bbaya S iv.140; A ii.15 (khandhānaṁ);
udaya -bbaya (ud — aya + vy — aya) increase & decrease, rise & fall, birth & death, up & down
dukkha=> (nirodha °anaṁ)

pātur (—°) (°pātu) (indecl.)=> -bhāva: appearance, coming into manifestation

āyatana: 3. sense — organ & object, etc…
genitive. dative. plural. Masculine. feminine. neuter. ānaṃ
accusative. Singular. Masculine. ānaṃ

Paṭilābha: obtaining, receiving, taking up, acquisition, assumption, attainment

Ayaṁ: demonstr. pron. "this, he"
vuccati: to be called ; See also vatti(to speak, say, call)
bhikkhu=> vocative. bhikkhave
Jāti: 1. birth, rebirth, possibility of rebirth, etc

Yā tesaṃ tesaṃ sattānaṃ tamhi tamhi sattanikāye jāti sañjāti okkanti abhinibbatti khandhānaṃ pātubhāvo āyatanānaṃ paṭilābho, ayaṃ vuccati, bhikkhave, jāti.

Dear @ElissaJ,

I don’t know your current status regarding this topic, but at one point the text linked below changed my perspective on learning Pali.

http://pali.nibbanam.com/immerse.htm

Metta and Smiles,
Mirco

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Thanks, I agree completely, you have to learn a language intensively otherwise you just waste time.

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hi adjahn sujato…i have a background in linguistics and recently greek during a christian phase. go to bswa in perth. surely given the script is phonological (far less messed up than english it would not be incredibly difficult with good coding (beyond me (i just know a bit about what is possible) but not beyond a jedi nlp coder…). to tag and parse the text automatically. made possible by phonological text. i know u have been to stanford but i dont know if u have talked to these guys.

professor christopher manning is their adjahn brahm…

they have all the software in python… and its open source

u could link it up with the roots in the pali society dictionary or any other after tagging automatically. pali dictionary seems very out of date but at least a good start. (i had a poke around in that)…

in recovery and newly sober atm but looking forward to helping out if i can get my s… together…looks awesome.

going from pali to english to another language is never going to work as well as adding in a good interlinear. i know u r working on some software to help other translators…may have already done it.

sorry about previous comment if wrong…but doesnt that the pali script is phonolgical mean its easier than english to automatically tag and parse (working out the right sense/phrase etc an entirely different matter and not possible atm…) english is a nightmare bcos not phonolgical like pali or italian.

these guys r the big cohunas… professor manning wrote one of the first statistical nlp texts.

python software is there…perhaps u would do a proportion then bootstrap… i

anyway as i said the stanford nlp group would b the people to ask.

Hey Tim,

Yes, it’s phonetic (like all Indic and south Asian languages), which solves a range of problems, but then there are a range of other problems. Pali has a rich and complex morphology, which means that the same word can appear in vastly different forms. Think, “Did he go?” “Yes he already went.” But on an industrial scale.

Then there is the problem that the corpus is relatively small compared to English, with fairly poor resources in terms of adequate dictionaries and the like.

Nonetheless, we are proceeding with this issue using ML approaches. A number of folks are looking into it and we should have some initial results soon. I am sure traditional NLP can also be useful, but the thing is simply finding someone to do the work.

do u know these guy?

looks like they already have something dont know how far they have got but some of the f measures look pretty good and even 0.5 looks like a good start.

now onward to learn some pali. is there a good set of graded lectures on youtube?

is there a grammar that is more technical and analytical with all the paradigms and an up to date analysis of morphosyntax.

i dont know python but i do know some r. a long way to go.

aware of this issue (have hons degree in linguistics)
…but i havent had a good enough look at pali…do know a good greek scholar who said he can understand sanskrit fairly easily and the case system looks the same. don’t know if u can use any of those existing tagged and stemmed corpora to help with that. anyway i dont know enough yet and i need to poke around more. this is so awesome. do have some ancient greek (well lame koine from greek at a seminary in christian phase) and was surprised to see the case system is virtually identical in pali. i think i rambled about this below but the first stage would be picking of the affixes and simple verbs like go/went (high frequency)… lower frequency words are far more likely to be regular (a universal i think)… anyway mostly overexcited. i think i have found a goal. i cant work fulltime (autism, bipolar ) . as i said un the other post the dictionary problem and finding the right sense for context and the semantics to difficult but tagging and stemming have got to b easier than english

Thankfully the relatively small corpus makes doing it by hand possible:

https://digitalpalidictionary.github.io/

This monk isn’t finished with the whole Tipiṭaka yet, but he is a large portion of the way there!

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