That’s correct, they are different words. Visaññuta is from the root “yoke”, visaññā from the root “know”.
Because it is rare, and probably impossible, for a writing system to represent the sounds of a language with 100% fidelity. There is always something lost, and something ambiguous. No system of coding is perfect. Moreover, as oral texts they are spoken by people from many backgrounds, each one of which has a slightly different dialect, pronunciation, or way of speaking. A certain degree of fuzziness is always present in language; even computer code is like this. So there may well be more than one way to express a given sound or set of sounds. Reciters of the different sections of the text might do things slightly differently. Copyists in different scripts use different conventions. And so on.
thanks for the explanation Bhante, that makes sense. however, it seems at some stage in history we could clean things up a bit and consolidate the digital version. visaññuto does not show up in the dictionaries in SC pali lookup or DPR with the correct “detached” definition. vi-saṃyutto does. in the digital world, it would be easy to switch to “saṃyutto”, or whichever is the better standard to adopt. samyutto seems to be it, because sam-yutto (yoga) (yoke) has a clear connection to the etymology. saññuto looks like “perception”.
i’m not just nitpicking this one word, i’m using the word as an example of a general policy. we could simply note in the dictionary under samyutto that “saññuto” was another transcribed version meaning the same word.
It is an interesting point. One of the reasons we use the Mahasangiti edition is because it is, I believe, the most consistent, so these issues are minimized.
Standardizing spellings is not a trivial process. For example, visaññuta = visaṁyutta = visamyutta, but visaññi ≠ visaṁyi (the latter is not a word). But it could be done, at least to a large extent.
The problem is that we have to assume that the digital text represents the underlying manuscript, in our case, the 1st printed edition of the Chattha Sangiti (corrected by the Dhamma Society). Variations in the Pali text (we assume) preserve variations in the printed editions, which (we assume) represent variations in the manuscripts. Now, when it is mere spelling inconsistencies it doesn’t really matter. But the line between such variation and meaningful textual variants is a blurry one. Any substantive revision would have to be done carefully by knowledgeable scholars consulting the printed sources.
Lacking the resources to develop an entire standardized text, the solution is to program such variants as aliases into the search engine, so a search for visaññuta would also return visaṁyutta and visamyutta. This already happens to some degree. Obviously it can and should be extended when we have the time.
This is much simpler, because we don’t assume that a search result is “correct”. So, for example, we could tell our search engine that ññ = ṁy and it would return visaṁyutta for visaññuta. Of course, it would also return visaṁyi (if it existed) for visaññi, which is incorrect. But getting some false positives in search results is not as critical a problem as changing the spelling of the Pali text.
i see, that makes sense. better to err on the safe side, and as long as the searching is robust to include variant mispellings in different version then people should be able to find what they’re looking for doing pattern searches across large collections.
