On the technical term "prat īka"

[Birgit Kellner]

Dear all,

the recent query by Petra Kieffer-Pülz regarding certain features of 
commentaries reminded me of a question I had meant to ask here for quite 
a while: scholars often use the technical term "pratīka" to refer to 
each and every word of a root-text that a commentary picks up.

This, I was once told, is inaccurate, for the indigenous use of 
"pratīka" is limited only to the words of the root-text taken up at the 
very beginning of the commentary section that is concerned with it.

Is this correct? If so, are people comfortable with then using an 
indigenous term with extended semantics, or would you rather prefer 
using an English neologism (or, say, the classicist "lemma") instead?

Best regards,

Birgit Kellner