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nipāto

nipāta

masc nom sg of nipāta (noun); masc nom sg of nipāta (adj)

1. fall; descent; drop
2. (gram) indeclinable particle; lit. falling down; something irregular
3. falling; descending; dropping
4. chapter of a book; section; division; lit. falling down

Built from

• ni — prefix · down, into
  Indicates downward motion or direction inward. Cognate with English nether and German nieder.
• pāta — root · fall, descent
  From √pat (to fall, fly). The root appears in Sanskrit patati (falls) and is cognate with Latin patēre (lies open, extends) and distantly with English feather. Here it names the act or result of falling downward.

Analysis. ni- (prefix, down, into) + pāta (root √pat, falling). A thing that falls down: used literally for a descent or drop, and figuratively for a grammatical form that 'falls' outside normal inflection (an indeclinable), and for a section of text that 'divides' a work.

Etymology. From ni- (down, into) + √pat (to fall, fly). The root √pat is cognate with Latin patēre (to lie open, extend) and English feather (from the sense of something light and falling). The prefix ni- gives the downward motion; nipāta is the concrete image of something falling down, applied abstractly to grammatical particles that stand outside the inflectional paradigm.

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

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