Re: Creating a Pali Tipitaka and Pali Literature Wiki-space

Hi Rett,

Good to hear from you again.

>> (1) It actually removes the scholars from the source text by a significant
>>degree of separation/alienation,
>
> This is a bit vague. [...]

It is --however, the rest of my former message includes many specific
examples of precisely what I meant.  In reducing a primary source to a
secondary source there is (in my terms) a degree of alienation: in
transliterating, you're obliterating (e.g.) one set of ambiguities, and
introducing another.  I wish I could say that the PTS system of Romanization
was less ambiguous than (e.g.) Burmese script (in the latter, e.g., capital
'o' is identical to 'sra') --but, as my former message stated, I think there
are some problems with the prevalent standards of Romanization.

The reduction of a Palm leaf (which is sometimes calligraphic or
illuminated) to an etext involves the loss of a lot of "information" --not
to mention aesthetic considerations.  Given that photo-duplication /
digitization is also less labour-intensive than transcription, I think
there's a lot to be said for putting images of original MS on disc.

Some of these issues are common to all forms of transcription (e.g. whether
MS are transcribed useing Roman text or devanagari) --however, there are
some issues that are specific to Romanization.  One thing that all the
classical Pali scripts have in common is that one glyph = one syllable.  A
complex system of ligatures and combined consonants in classical Sinhalese &
Burmese (& Khom & others) ensures that you have one glyph representing each
syllable; and this is radically untrue of Romanized text.  If you think this
is a purely aesthetic question, I would say that for discerning (e.g.) metre
in poetry, it is quite substantive.

Fundamentally, if you're going to carry out a comparative reading of primary
sources you want to use ABSOLUTELY PRIMARY sources.  You don't want to rely
on someone else's guess as to whether the original had "o" or "sra" (etc.)
  --you want to work with the ambiguities found in the original, and resolve
them for yourself.  Senart's edition of Kacc. is terrible this way --all the
euphonic combinations are broken up into separate words, etc. (nobody would
put up with Shakespear's English being "reformed" this way --why do
Palicists care so little about these kinds of changes in western editions of
the canon?).

> As for putting SE Asian readers at a disadvantage, what do you think of the 6th council CD put out by VRI.

I tried to order a copy, they told me that it was no more.  I saw it used
once by a Sinhalese monk (at a monastery).  The classical Sinh. font is a
bit crude --but they made a good effort using a *very* limited Roman
encoding (i.e., not Unicode at all).

> There you can choose between Roman, Sinhalese, Burmese etc, so the reader can pick whatever is most comfortable. In a digital resource it ought to be easy to provide these sorts of conversion tools.

Yes, I had a lengthy negotiation with a computer programmer (from Yunnan)
last week --he promises me that he will create a Unicode solution to
transcribe from Romanized to "true" S.E.A. scripts.  He also said that (in
order to do this) he would need me to create a table of every possible
ligature in every possible script ... *sigh* ...  However, the question of
how to resolve the problems that romanization has introduced into the text
remains; e.g., how do you come up with a program that can interpret and
correctly remove the apostrophe in PTS-style Pali?

> ... where the dental nasal has been standardized to an anusvara?

I'm talking about "Romanization" that involves taking (e.g.) a compound word
or elided-combination of words, and breaking them into two (or more)
separate words with a space and an anusvara (instead of m, n, .n, or any of
the other possibilties created by the rules of permutation).  This is a
violence to the source text, and it can obscure the poetics.  The use of the
apostrophe also seems very problematic to me.

> I agree that this uglifies the text to a certain degree though I'm not sure how it is to be construed as a 'desecration'.

(1) It changes the sound of the text, and poetry consists of sound (not
meaning), (2) it changes the metre of the text, and poetics make use of
meter, (3) it obliterates what all classical Pali grammars consider an
important part of the language --euphony.  I'm told that Panini goes on
about euphony for an enormous length of the opening of his Sk. grammar
  --although I've never read it.

> Is it less of a 'desecration' when Sinhalese editors do this sort of thing?

No, it can be just as great a problem with some Devanagari editions, as I
have mentioned (Jim recently discussed this with me off-list).  I haven't
seen the same problem with Sinhalese script; although it seems that Sri
Lankan typesetters have sometimes replaced the velar n ('n) with the
anuswara (.m) simply due to the lack of available cut-type combinations
(e.g., 'nkha) in their presses.  This will cease to be an issue with the
advent of computer typesetting.

[Re: the apostrophe:]

> ...This could, however, be a bad thing since if the person resolving an ambiguity has made the wrong decision, his or her intervention could obscure the actual meaning of the text. It would have been better to leave the ambiguity in the edition and allow the reader to decide.

Agreed.

Thus, a photo duplicate of an original MS is more valuable than an e-text in
all these ways and more.  However, I also agree with your point that for
rapidly finding a particular passage of text, even a highly flawed e-text is
much better than none at all; a computer can't sift through images as easily
as it can through text.

E.M.


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