Duroiselle; Pali-English / Pali-Pali dictionary

In reply to Bhante Yuttadhammo,

(1)
> What about Duroiselle's grammar?  Is it not considered complete, accurate
> and useful (I use it all the time)? 

I made many comparative readings of Duroiselle's tables (etc.) with other
textbooks; I would say (in general) that his book is just as [in-]accurate
as any other of its era.  He makes some very useful observations from time
to time, but (just as often) I find them contradicted by other sources. 
There are also some errors caused by the formatting of the text (e.g., data
in the wrong column) that could be improved if it were available in .TXT
instead of .PDF format.

I have recently carried out a re-formatting (& error correction) of the
basic Pali grammar written by Narada Thera fifty years ago.  I will probably
release the text once I have written a new answer key & vocabulary for it
(many of the word definitions are ... flawed).  However, Narada's text is
flawed & inadequate in all of the ways mentioned in the recent discussion
with Dr. Pind; it is a very basic text --and although it provides very
little direction to the reader, some of that is nevertheless wrong!

In any case, I'm sure both Duroiselle & Narada did their best in difficult
circumstances; I can imagine the difficulty of their work in compiling those
tables in Rangoon & Kandy (respectively), as I am myself spending so much
time correcting Pali grammatical tables here in the Lao P.D.R.!

(2)
> I am happy to hear, anyway of this project.  I have been talking privately
> with Alexander Genaud about making some kind of public domain PE dictionary...

I thought Jim had an interesting idea in trying to generate a lexicon from
existing (commentarial) Pali definitions; I believe the Hewaviratane edition
of the commentaries is indexed --thus, it wouldn't be too much work to
generate a Pali-Pali dictionary from existing resources.  In the early
stages, this could exist in some kind of electronic hyperlink format --with
all commentarial definitions listed vertically.  Then the different
definitions could be compared, merged, revised, etc., into one
trans-commentarial gloss --either incorporating the material from all of the
commentaries' comments on the word, or rejecting some as false for footnoted
reasons.

I would actually hope that such a lexicon would include some of the really
hilarious and strange definitions that crop up from time to time.  "By means
of what is it called 'butterfly'?  Because it has occasion to 'flutter-by'
  --therefore, 'butterfly'" (--I have invented this as an English equivalent
to some of the odd wordplay that appears in the role of a definition).

This sort of methodology could be a good "gradual" project for many persons
to dabble in.  However, if you want to start with a five million dollar
bursary, I would propose a very different methodology.

As the cessation of the CPD project shows, fundraising is a serious concern
for lexical endeavours.

E.M.


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