Lol, took the words out of my mouth.
This is nothing more than a naive theory of language, typical of people who don’t actually know the language they’re using. It is 100% normal that in any translation, no matter how trivial, the mode of expression in the source language does not completely match the mode of expression in the target.
The problem is what programmers call a “leaky abstraction”. Languages have no such things as “past participles”, “articles”, or “gerunds”. These are abstractions invented by grammarians to help make sense of how people use language. So when linguists say this is a “past participle” in English and that is a “past participle” in Pali, what they assume is that, “these two linguistic forms have enough in common that linguists have decided to label them both with the term ‘past participle’, although their forms and usage do not correspond completely.” It’s as if you see tribes-people on the Amazon in a canoe, and then people in China on a maglev train, and you call them both “transport”, and then assume that they are the same thing because they have the same word.
Brasington, implicitly assuming these categories are real properties of language, asserts that, since Pali lacks articles, using one “cannot be correct”. In doing so, he strikes a bold stance against literally every translator of Pali and Sanskrit, who all use articles all the time. There’s nothing interesting or unusual about this case.
Of course, if we have decided that articles cannot be used, then we cannot make a translation, because English relies on articles. So he then goes on to “convert it to better flowing English”, by which he means, “turns the past participles into present participles”. He then confusingly refers to these as “gerunds”, a term that has a completely different meaning in Pali grammar, which just illustrates my point.
In all of this, he also misconstrues the meaning of the words he is referring to. In this context, the “seen, heard, thought, and cognized” do not refer to the simple objects of the senses. Rather, as Jayatillecke showed long ago, they are terms of epistemology, referring to means by which (spiritual) truths are known. This might be via the “sight” of a holy person, what is “heard” in the oral tradition, by what one “thinks out”, or by what one “cognizes” in meditation.
Also, “sensed” is wrong, muta means “thought”, although good translators also make that mistake.
Dhamma teachers really should do some Pali courses before speculating about Pali. It’s irresponsible.
Per above, no.