14:15 The distinction of quantity (short and long vowels or syllables) is very important in Pali, but distinctions of stress are insignificant.

15:13 A syllable is long if its vowel is long or if the vowel, though short, is followed by the pure nasal or by two or more consonants. A long syllable is exactly equal to two short syllables. (The total length of a long syllable being constant, a double consonant tends to compress and shorten a long vowel preceding it, and itself to be shortened by the long vowel.)

17:10 Double consonants are very frequent in Pali and must be strictly pronounced as long consonants, thus nn is like English nn in "unnecessary".

19:20 The dictionary order of letters is a, ā, i, ī, u, ū, e, o, ṃ (this may also stand in the place of one of the other nasals, according to the consonant which follows), stops: guttural (k, kh, etc.), palatal . . . labial, y, r, l, ḷ, ḷh, v, s, h.

a-ā-i-ī-u-ū-e-o-ṃ-

k-kh-g-gh-ṅ-

c-ch-j-jh-ñ-

ṭ-ṭh-ḍ-ḍh-ṇ-

t-th-d-dh-n-

p-ph-b-bh-m-

y-r-l-ḷ-ḷh-v-s-h

The Sentence

19:30 The analysis and the learning of any language should be based on the study of sentences, that is, of the language as it is actually found in use. It is useful to study words in order to understand the sentences, but, like roots and stems, isolated words are in fact mere abstractions devised by grammarians for the analysis of language. (In the Indian tradition of writing "words" are not separated and each sentence appears as a continuous piece, as in speech. Only by grammatical analysis can words be abstracted: marked by certain "inflections".)

21:10 It is the sentences which are the natural units of discourse and which are the minimum units having precise, fully articulated meaning. For purposes of study we have to assign approximate meanings to words and list these in vocabularies, but these generalised meanings of words are extremely vague, whereas sentences have exact meanings. In translation one may find close equivalents for sentences, whilst it is often impossible to give close equivalents for words.

23:30 Ideally one should learn a language as children pick up their mother tongue, by learning a sufficiently large number of its sentences, but this would take too long for most students. Hence the study of words and inflections offers a short cut to proficiency, though at the risk of lack of precision and of idiomatic fluency.

24:01 The uninflected form of a Pali word, without an ending, is called the stem. In dictionaries and vocabularies nouns (nama) are usually listed in their stem forms, less often in the form of the nominative singular. Verbs (akhyata), however, are usually given under the form of the third person singular of the present tense (indicative active), sometimes under the "root".

25:10 In this book verbs are given in the root form (but with their prefixes where these are used, hence in the alphabetical position of the prefixes in these cases), nouns in the stem form except in the case of stems in -a, where it is more convenient to learn them in the form of the nominative singular since thereby one learns the gender at the same time (-o = masculine, -aṃ = neuter).

25:52 The prefixes (upasagga), of which there are about twenty, are regarded as a separate part of speech in Pali.

26:06 The various verbs, consisting of prefix + root, have all to be learned separately as regards meanings.

26:33 Although the separate prefixes and roots can be assigned meanings—usually rather broad and vague ones—the meaning of a prefix + root cannot usually be accounted for adequately as simply the product of the two separate meanings. A good many roots are used also without prefixes, but prefixed forms are very much more frequent in Pali. A number of verbs have two or three prefixes to their roots.

27:53 We have noticed also that words may be classified as verbs … nouns … and prefixes. There is one other (fourth) class, that of indeclinables (nipāta), defined as not taking any inflections.