Re: Further Pali Grammatica

Dear Eisel and group,

Thanks for the ongoing descriptions of your travels - great reading and interesting. I'll look out for Tha Do Oung 's Kacc study. Is it in English?  There are boxes of uncatalogued Pali-related books in Uppsala which I haven't had time yet to dig through. It's not impossible that it would be in that collection.

Just a few points about the below.


>However, even the best
>volumes (within the inconsistent range that I described) stand in
>un-flattering contrast to the first edition.  Most of the re-printed
>volumes that I handled had inconsistent page-colour (e.g., one hundred
>pages in grimy white, followed by two hundred of grimy yellow, then
>switching back, showing a printer who didn't care about alternating
>between different paper stock --all of it rather poor quality) and, as
>I say, the actual quality of the text, etc., would be a disappointment
>to a westerner --especially if their expectations were formed on the
>basis of the first edition.

This sounds like my usual experience of books from South Asia. I have books printed in Delhi, Calcutta and Bombay that switch colors, have scrunched pages, have overinked pages, underinked pages, pages where broken type has been 'fixed' by scratching the missing letters in by hand on the plates, books with so much camphor in them you'd think you were locked in an old wardrobe in a trench on the Somme 1916, and books which are marred by excessive typos, suggesting complete lack of interest on the part of the typesetters.

Compared to these, my Jataka commentary reprints are towards the upper end of the scale. They're fine. Maybe that's why I didn't react.

I have a couple of volumes of the first edition, and you're right that it seems more consistent, but the difference is not that huge. And this also reflects a wider trend: Indian books printed in the first half of the last century or earlier seem to hold a higher level of quality than later ones. I don't know the reason for that.

I took your post as suggesting these reprints were unusually abysmal, which the ten or so volumes I have aren't. On the contrary they're quite okay by South Asian standards. My Vol IX (Netti Comm) is excellently printed, for instance. I haven't found a single unsatisfactory page in it (again, back cover stamped: Printed by Printing House 23.02.1991. Maybe you're looking at a later printing?)

Even if some volumes are worse, students get used dealing with typos and missing or half-missing bits of text. And as I understand it, the occasional typo goes directly back to the first edition. (things like maatucchito, which should be maatukucchito, not covered by the errata probably because it's so unproblematic a reader doesn't even notice the missing ku character)

Sanskrit requires a combination of two contradictory character traits: nitpicking attention to detail in grammar (to the point of being a control freak), and a relaxed mañaña attitude towards bad printing and typos. Reading bad editions is a kind of militaristic hazing western students of Sanskrit are put through to see if they can handle the stress. Compared to that, these volumes are a walk in the park.


>  While it is true that these Sinhalese editions are cheap, having
>them shipped is certainly not;

Air mail shipping approximately doubles the price in my experience, which makes them still a good deal.

>further, howeverso cheap they may be,
>they are not cheaper than Burmese, Indian, or Taiwanese editions --and
>the Burmese, Indian and Taiwanese re-prints and editions I have seen
>are more legible, and less depressing to look at.

I'd love to be able to order Burmese editions. Where do you order them from? I'm still looking for a reliable bookseller, in Rangoon or elsewhere, who handles Burmese editions of Pali works and ships worldwide.

One advantage of Sinhalese editions is that the Sinhalese syllabary contains a lot of redundancy in the characters (a trait not shared by modern fonts which have removed some of the flourishes). This makes it easier to read a character that is partly broken or smudged. Burmese characters, because of their minimalism, seem to me to be more sensitive to bad printing. If half the character is gone you often haven't got a chance of guessing it if you can't guess the word and work backwards.

Best regards,

/Rett