Dear Teng Kee,

> Yes,there are books and theses from China and Taiwan
> deal with the grammar in buddhist texts.I can't
> remember the name.

I have, or know of, some works in Chinese that deal with or mention various
aspects of the grammar and lexicography of Buddhist texts, but these are all
descriptive -- not handbooks for people wanting to learn to read the texts
themselves. So I would be interested to know if such actually exist in
Chinese. There is nothing in English but there are several handbooks for
learners in Japanese.

> I haven' met anyone saying old chinese grammar is
> simpler than modern chinese.nouns can turn into verbs
> which is not easy to understand.

Well, you have now :) But perhaps it is not so easy for somebody coming
from modern Chinese linguistic background -- even the word order is often
different. There should be no difficulty about the fluidity of words in
literary or classical Chinese -- it's usually obvious from the structure of
the sentence -- and English speakers should be familar with nouns becoming
verbs because that happens all the time in English speech.

> Pali grammar texts are enormous

You have misunderstood my meaning -- I was not talking about the Pali
grammar books but the sheer quanity of inflections for the nouns/adjectives
and the verbs. As you know, Chinese words are not inflected in any way.
Grammatical relations in literary Chinese are indicated by word order or a
small group of prepositions (words like "yi" [by, with] and "yu" [in, at,
to, from etc], called "coverbs" in many English-language textbooks).
Classical / literary Chinese grammar is incredibly simple in comparison with
the Indian languages. Perhaps some of the difficulty that one might
experience with pre-modern Chinese lies here: the sentences are often very
concise and elliptical so that interpretation becomes difficult -- though
this is less of a problem with most Buddhist texts.

Hope this clarifies my assertions.

Best wishes,
Stephen Hodge