SuttaCentral
Hi,
Ven. Nyanatusita’s table is certainly wonderful and indispensable.
But for a Pāli learner to gaze at it and think- ‘this is crazy! I’m out!’ would be unfortunate.
To me it would be like a English language learner thinking, ‘unless I learn every word in the unabridged Oxford English Dictionary, I’m not going to be able to speak this language.’
I am a native English language speaker and still look up words all the time!
Re: frequency count.
A program can only know what you tell it to do, but some hints from historical linguistics…
The locative ending -e, as the older form is “on the way out” historically. This is why Kaccayana etc gives -smi.m as the base, which would be true of commentarial Pali. You might be able to see this happening by the late books of the KN already, where -smi.m is starting to take over.
But in the other nikaayas there will be a mix.
The same for the ablative ending -aa, which is also “on the way out” to eventual replacement by -smaa and -to. By the time of the Prakrits of 0-1000CE, the -aa ablative ending will be limited to fixed Sanskritic expressions only, like “bhayaa”, from fear. In the nikaayas there is a mix. But this is why Kaccayana gives the later -smaa as the base.
The same for inst. and abl. pl. -ebhi, which is the older form and thus slated for eventual replacement by -ehi, which Kaccayana gives as the base.
I would just write a textbook with the actual % already. But SC Sanskrit will never get done if I do that.
Great explanation! Thanks a lot.
With mettā,
Rutty🙏
Nice. I’m quite sure, though, that the column of feminines in -ī/in is supposed to be feminines in -i.
This has been an interesting discussion to follow. The positions of the Pāḷi learner and the language nerd have been well stated, and I can identify and sympathise with both. (Just adding that I’ve attempted a new language approximately every ten years and that with each passing decade I can observe a waning of the ability to memorise lists of vocabulary and inflections.)
How about approaching from the point of view of language pedagogy?
Pedagogical principles include such matters as taking into consideration the learner (age, temperament, educational level, learning motivation etc) and the way the learner intends to use the target language (reading, writing, conversation, chanting etc).
Of the learner characteristics what I’ve called ‘temperament’ is the most relevant here imho. Different language learners prefer different learning styles. There are visual, auditory, reading/writing, kinesthetic, and tactile styles, but most interesting are the analytic and synthetic learning styles. Analytic learners do best when given a whole and the tools to analyse it; Gair & Karunatilake take this approach. Synthetic learners prefer to work from the bottom up, to take small items and combine them into larger structures; De Silva leans more in this direction. Learners with a stronger synthetic bent do well learning inflections first; learners who tend to be more analytic will remember forms most easily if they encounter them in context first and then infer and remember meanings of inflectional endings in context. Good teachers present material in both ways, aware the students in a class differ in how they learn most easily.
With regard to intended use, none of us are looking for conversational fluency. Some who want to chant will be satisfied with rote repetition an a general idea of the meanings of chunks of text; they don’t need to worry about inflections at all. Those who want write Pāḷi will need to get control of all the paradigms but won’t need to worry about alternative endings. Those who want read Pāḷi will aspire to recognise anything, and so they may feel they are faced with Jim’s impossible task.
When I started learning Pāḷi I assumed that committing a few dozen more paradigms to memory was just a matter of proceeding methodically and linking the forms I would be learning to familiar textual examples from chants I already knew and suttas I would soon memorise. It is being very slow indeed, and sometimes I’ve had to pull myself back from the brink of giving up.
My advice to people like myself is to focus on learning the most useful paradigms and to leave the rest for later. Trusting that de Silva knew which the most useful are, we can learn the Pāḷi Primer Language Guide thoroughly. We can use Ven. Nyanatusita’s table etc to look up the rest, at least for the time being. Start deliberately memorising these additional forms only after the Pāḷi Primer material and some favourite suttas are securely fastened under the belt!
Pali Primer Language Guide.pdf (124.2 KB)
Thanks, @Gillian This is really helpful.
I didn’t know it at the time, but my first Classical Greek teacher had an analytic approach and I floundered. My 2nd teacher has a more synthetic approach and it went smoother.
With Pali, I felt I progressed with Pali Primer. With G&K I felt I was slowly getting further and further behind.
I’ve gone back to the beginning and I’m currently working through A K Warder’s Intro to Pali with Ajahn Brahmali’s lectures. And I’m going slower so I get in a lot more vocabulary practice with AnkiDroid and more time memorizing key paradigms. So your comments about learning styles is quite interesting.
Also, it is helpful to remind myself there is no hurry. The key is not stopping, which means the biggest factor is keeping it fun. And it’s a lot more fun - for me - the closer I work with sentences I can almost read, and not passages that send me to the dictionary and declension tables for over half the words.