‹ Back to the text

cattārome

sandhi contraction of cattāro + ime

1. these four

Built from

• cattāro — root · four
  From PIE *kʷetwóres; the cardinal number. Cognates: English four, Latin quattuor, Greek téssares, Sanskrit catvāraḥ.
• ime — ending · these (nom. pl. m.)
  Nominative plural masculine of the demonstrative pronoun idam. The -me ending marks the nominative plural in the masculine; the vowel -i- and root *id- relate to the family of demonstratives meaning 'this'.

Analysis. cattāro (four) + ime (these, nominative plural masculine of idam); the final -o of cattāro elides before the vowel of ime, yielding cattārome. A common sandhi pattern in Pali, used when enumerating items: 'these four [things]' or '[the] four'.

Etymology. cattāro derives from Proto-Indo-European *kʷetwóres (four), cognate with English four, Latin quattuor, Greek téssares. The stem appears in Sanskrit catvāraḥ. ime is the nominative plural masculine of idam (this), from PIE *i-do-m, related to English this via the demonstrative root *i-.

Meanings from the Digital Pāḷi Dictionary; morphology and etymology by Claude.

Lite mode — plain HTML for e-readers and old browsers. Full version