Re: update

Dear Yong Peng,

Thanks for responding! The three most important Pali grammars to keep
in mind are: Kaccaayanavyaakara.na (the earliest one), Saddaniiti, &
Moggallaanavyaakara.na. Except for the third volume (suttamaala) of
the Saddaniiti, all are available on the CSCD disk or from
tipitaka.org. The first and last can also be found in the grammar.zip
file from SLTP. Two of the three Kaccaayanavyaakara.na texts I'm using
for our study are from these two sources while the remaining one is a
printed Burmese copy I have which is practically identical to the CSCD
version.

As far as I can tell, there are very few old Pali grammars printed in
Roman characters. One of them, of course, is H. Smith's edition of the
Saddaniiti now available from the Pali Text Society after being out of
print for some time. I understand that O. Pind is preparing a new
edition of Kaccayana's grammar and there is E. Senart's 1871 edition
of this text. I only have 4 complete printed Pali grammars in my
collection and wish I had many more but it is not easy to find exactly
where one can buy such books. I have been making some enquiries about
where to buy them in India and Sri Lanka and will let you know if I
get lucky. I think the best places to look are in India, Burma, Sri
Lanka, and Thailand. I'm sure their texts won't be in Roman letters
but I'm willing to learn new scripts if necessary as I already can
read Pali in the Devanagari and Burmese scripts.

A future project could be to compile a comprehensive list of these old
Pali grammars and other related linguistic treatises with detailed
information about their contents, relationship to other texts,
printing history, availability, and so on. The CSCD has 20 of these
texts and the Critical Pali Dictionary has quite a long list of them
in its bibliography.

Best wishes,
Jim

> Dear Jim,
>
> I'm glad to hear from you again. And it's good to resume Kaccayana's
> grammar. If it is possible, when you have the time, would you tell
us
> more in general the "different" ancient grammars that is available,
and
> where copies of them can be found. Many thanks.
>
> metta,
> Yong Peng.