The -ae That Does Five Jobs
An 8-mark grammar item is built on one sentence: 'Nandae putto samanam vandai.' Part (a) asks for the case and number of Nandae, putto and samanam; part (b) for the stem, gender and paradigm of Nandae and putto; part (c) for splitting and naming the sandhi in the next line, where tassa is followed by aham. Forty-five students attempt it. Twenty-seven gloss Nandae as instrumental, 'by Nanda', because Marathi 'ne' marks the instrumental and Marathi 'Nandene' looks and sounds like the Prakrit form. Eleven build the paradigm of Nandae on the masculine a-stem pattern, producing forms like Nandao for the plural genitive. Two students get the case right but cannot say why the ending alone does not settle it. The answer key supplies one-word answers only.
1. Resolve Nandae: which case and number, and why can the ending not settle it by itself?
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Genitive singular, feminine a-stem, depending on putto.
The ending -ae is genuinely overloaded in the feminine a-declension: instrumental, dative, ablative, genitive and locative singular can all surface as -ae. So the form cannot be interrogated for case in isolation; only syntax decides. The head noun is putto, nominative singular of putta, and 'Nanda's son' requires a genitive. Read as instrumental, the sentence would yield 'the son salutes the monk by Nanda', which makes Nanda the saluter and contradicts putto as subject. That contradiction, not the shape of the word, is the proof.
Paradigm for part (b): Nanda (nom sg), Nandam (acc sg), Nandae (instr, dat, abl, gen, loc sg), Nandao (nom and acc pl), Nandahim (instr and abl pl), Nandanam (gen and dat pl), Nandasu (loc pl).
Marking: 'genitive singular' only. A script that writes 'instrumental or genitive' without choosing has not answered the question that was asked, however true the observation is.
2. Treat the 27 'instrumental' answers as a teaching opportunity: diagnose and correct the interference.
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The diagnosis is transfer, not ignorance. Marathi marks the instrumental with ne ('Nandene'), the Prakrit form ends in -ae, and the ear supplies the rest. Students are pattern-matching sound, and the pattern is one they have used successfully for years.
Correct it with a contrast the ear cannot blur. Put two sentences side by side: one where a feminine -ae form is instrumental and must attach to the verb, one where it is genitive and must attach to a following noun. Ask which word the -ae form is 'leaning on' in each. The lean is the case.
Add a second contrast in Marathi itself: show that 'Nandecha putra' and 'Nandene dile' use different Marathi endings for different jobs, so even Marathi does not rely on one form for everything. Then drill five -ae forms with the question 'what does this word lean on?' rather than 'what does this word end in?'. Re-test with an unseen sentence, not the same one.
3. Finish part (c): split the sandhi and state the rule. What marking error should the scheme avoid?
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tassa + aham becomes tassaham, by the rule that a followed by a contracts to a long a. The first word's final vowel and the second word's initial vowel fuse into a single long vowel; nothing is inserted and nothing is dropped beyond the fusion.
The marking error to avoid is accepting a split that is phonetically possible but not the one in the line. Schemes written as one-word answers tempt markers to give the mark for 'tassa + aham' written in any order or with the fusion ignored. Require two things: the split, and the name of the operation. Also penalise the reverse error, where a student invents a glide or writes the vowels side by side instead of contracting them.
Connect the item back to part (a): sandhi is decided by the vowels, case by the syntax. Students who mix the two - guessing case from the final vowel of a sandhi-bound word - produce exactly the -ae error seen in the 27 scripts.