Quotation mark was not removed from the text even with the saṃdhi to keep it clear the part which needs to be qouted.
Ven. Sujato pointed out it’s better to use -ṃ"ti. Accorsing to pali grammar to separate that way, ti should be the later word not iti. I think the samdhi, -ṃ"iti or -ṃ" iti are correct without saṃdhi. However, PTS dictionary says there is this this word ti used this way as I remeber. Therefore bhante’s way might also be correct. Literally ti means three. In texts with sinhalese charactors (palm leaves) that I have seen no punctuations found other than a mark to show full stop (෴ - kunddhaliya). Especially [් ]Hal kirīma
is not used. (Do not know about Burmese or Thai.) Words are not separated.
It seems the digital and printed copies adopted some parts as there were in those texts. There are some very long words (connected with saṃdhi) in commentaries.
‘iti’ is a clitic and as such it should always be glued to the word. Morever it “becomes” -ti because of sandhi rules, but most of the time this would lengthen the last vowel instead of producing a more visible change. And so it might seem there are two different entities ‘iti’ and ‘ti’.
If you ask me it’s our western quotation mark system that gave rise to this discussion.
It’s very interesting that you write saṃdhi. This is an autological word (an example of itself) and should be read as ‘sandhi’. Also it should probably be written as ‘sandhi’.
If we are to lose all sandhi changes many words would look differently, for example if we go for writing ṃ where sandhi would change the phonological value of ṃ we should go for:
dhammaṃca instead of “dhammañca”
yaṃidaṃ or “yaṃ idaṃ” instead of yadidaṃ
So you see why I think that probably the core of the problem are the western quotation marks. I don’t know which way would be more appropriate. Someone should probably just standardize this.
