Answer Key

Editor's note

This answer key will be an invaluable aid to the beginning student who is teaching him- or herself Pali from A.K. Warder's Introduction to Pali (3^rdedition) (Oxford: Pali Text Society, 1991). In addition to giving detailed answers to the exercises, Kelly includes (for exercises 4 onwards) the references to the sutta passages in the Digha Nikaya from which the exercises were drawn. He has also corrected a number of errors in Warder's own references.

Sutta references follow the PTS numbering convention. For example, D.II.85 refers to volume 2, page 85 of the PTS Pali edition of the Digha Nikaya. The numbers that follow (e.g., xvi.1.22) refer to the sutta, paragraph, and sub-paragraph numbers. This numbering scheme is used both in the PTS Pali edition and in Maurice Walshe's The Long Discourses of the Buddha (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 1987). Comparisons between the two editions are thus easily made.

Each line in the answers below has three parts: the original text to be translated (English or Pali, in bold), followed by a literal translation, and concluding with a more idiomatic and fluent translation. Pali text is represented here using the Velthuis convention. To wit: long vowels are doubled (aa, ii, uu) and punctuation preceding a consonant is used to indicate a diacritic mark. For example, the cerebral "t" ("t-with-a-dot-under-it") is written as ".t"; the palatal "n" ("n-with-a-tilde-over-it") is written as "~n"; and so on.

For another take on the English-to-Pali Exercises, see the Pali Text Society's » answers to English-to-Pali Exercises 7-30.

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