SuttaCentral
Thread for discussing John Kelly’s Pāli 2024 (G&K) Class 32 for the class on November 17th / 18th 2024.
Meeting ID: 829 5896 1475
Passcode: anicca
You will need to remain in the “waiting room” until host lets you in.
Homework preparation for this class:
Study G&K Lesson XII: Grammar, pp. 169-172
Study G&K Glossary XII-1, pp. 165-169
Complete G&K Lesson XII: Readings 1-4, pp. 163-165
Te assa yaṃ vā taṃ vā rukkhatacādiṃ ācikkhiṃsu.
John’s translation was: " They informed him of such and such tree-bark, etc."
Struggling with the “te assa” here, which might be what the “yaṃ” refers to. Might this be the stylized pronoun Alison mentioned in her [post about tasse te / so ahaṃ / tassa mayhaṃ?]
“They told him treebark for whichever or that.” ?
(John Kelly’s Pāli 2024 (G&K) Class 30 - #15 by hoffmann)
Separately, was unable to find " rukkhatacâdiṃ" in either DPD or UofChicago, nor even as a searchword in sutta central. " Tried several variations of rukkhata to no avail, and finally only used reverse lookup to discover that rukkhattaca" is tree bark… so still am at a loss as to what the full phrase pre-sandhi is… or how you found its defintiion when first encounting in the wild, @johnk . 
Good questions!
Te assa … ācikkhiṃsu.
They to him … informed (about). Ācikkati takes the dative.
… yaṃ vā taṃ vā rukkhatacādiṃ
Here yaṃ vā taṃ vā, literally “which or that or” is an idiomatic expression meaning such and such (something stated non-specifically)
And rukkhatacādiṃ breaks down before sandhi as rukkha-taca-ādiṃ, where ādi is the Pāḷi word meaning etc. or and so on.
Note that taca is in the G&K glossary for this chapter as “bark”, thus the whole word is “tree bark, etc.”
DPD Deconstructor can be helpful for sandi and compounds.
I found this from the PTS entry for ‘ya’:
…yaṃ vā taṃ vā karotu let her do whatever she likes (Vv-a.208)…
So here could it mean that they informed him whatever (nonsense) tree bark, which would eventually worsen his son’s illness?
Taca is certainly tree bark in this context, but when contemplating the 32 parts of the body it has the meaning of ‘skin’.
Yes, taca just means skin or outer layer, so includes skin of the body, bark of a tree, rind or peel of a fruit, etc.
Yes, the rendering ‘whatever’ works well, too.
