I just want to ask some questions and get some opinions.
Some background first.
I am 23 year old from Australia.
I am self taught in mostly everything I do but help is great aswell.
I wish to teach myself many ancient and modern languages.
Particularly religious languages.
One of my areas of great interest is the tipitaka and palibhasa.
I wish to learn enough of indian languages and textual criticism to
study these texts deeply.
As a buddhist i feel that a great gift is to think, speak and act
with love, charity and wisdom.
I also feel that the mind can be sharp and with those ingredients and
charity much learning for the good of this world can take place.
The text has many difficulties (life also) that are hard to work out.
Such as:
is the j a 'z' sound?
why are there a lot of 2 vowel pairs even though it is not proper
pali.
meaning may well be worked out without solving all of these problems
but sometimes we may have great difficulties.
I wish to memorize also so these problems make it troubling.
If one is to memorize, must one go with one variant over another?
I have many more questions but for now I will leave with one more.
Where can I find each of these textual tradition for download?
Thai edition
Sixth Council edition
Sinhalese (Buddha Jayanti) edition
any older texts such as kharosthi, or gandharan?
I am in the process of creating a nicely organized version of the one
at tipitaka.org
painful to download xml files so I am familiarizing myself with the
cannon as well at converting to html by hand.