Correcting a Composition Exercise on the Aorist
A Class 12 composition exercise asks students to write four connected Pali sentences in the past tense about a monk who goes to a village, sits under a tree and teaches. The marking rubric gives 2 marks for case endings, 2 for verb agreement, 2 for tense, 2 for sandhi, and 2 for coherence. Candidate A writes: “Bhikkhu gāmaṃ agacchi. So rukkhamūle nisīdi. Bhikkhūnaṃ dhammaṃ desesi.” Candidate B writes: “Bhikkhu gāmaṃ gacchati. So rukkhamūle nisīdati. Bhikkhūnaṃ dhammaṃ deseti.” Candidate C writes: “Gāmaṃ gato bhikkhū rukkhamūle nisīdiṃsu. Te bhikkhūnaṃ dhammaṃ desesuṃ.” The teacher asks you to grade A, B and C and to explain one sandhi point: why “so āha” becomes “sāha”. You must keep the rubric but also reward grammatical reasoning.
1. Grade A, B and C out of 10 using the rubric and identify the single most serious error in each.
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A: 8/10. Case endings and verb agreement are sound; all three verbs are past (agacchi, nisīdi, desesi); the only missing rubric element is sandhi, since no sandhi context is attempted. B: 6/10. The syntax is correct, but gacchati, nisīdati and deseti are present tense, so the tense mark is lost; if the rubric rewards attempted sandhi, B also loses that mark. C: 7/10. The past tense and plural verb nisīdiṃsu are correct, but gato is singular and cannot agree with plural bhikkhū; it should be gatā. The most serious error in C is therefore participial agreement, not tense. The grades should be accompanied by corrections, because the exercise tests applied grammar, not just a final number.
2. Explain the sandhi “so āha” → “sāha” and state what a student must show to earn the sandhi mark.
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so + āha → sāha. The final -o of the pronoun is elided before the initial vowel ā, and the two words are written as one. A student earns the sandhi mark by showing the two original words, naming the operation (vowel elision/combination at word boundary), and giving the contracted form; writing sāha alone, without the analysis, is not enough. If the student writes “so āha” in the resolved form, that is correct citation but does not demonstrate sandhi; award the sandhi mark only for the analysed form or an explicit statement of the rule.