Duroiselle's Grammar: New Edition, Introduction

In recent days I have begun compiling a "new edition" of Duroiselle's
grammar (much to my own dismay).

Bhante Nyanatusita was enthusiastic to see the e-text revised.  My
current plans are limited in scope, and will likely produce a set of
resources similar to those I created for the (much shorter) work by
Narada (see:  www.pratyeka.org/narada).

I'm posting the introduction to the "4th edition" (viz., a revised
etext) with two intentions: (1) members of the list might want to
mention other works of the period that I could add to the review of
Duroiselle's milieu, and (2) if anyone (such as Nyanatusita?) has been
compiling a list of errata from the third edition, now would be the
time to mention it. --E.M.

PREFACE TO THE FOURTH EDITION
In 1906, Duroiselle was writing during a brief period of frenetic
English-language scholarship on the Pāli language in general, and its
classical grammar in particular.  The prelude to this period was the
research conducted by James D'Alwis in the 1850s and published in 1863
as An Introduction to Kachchayana's Grammar of the Pali Language.  I
found a copy of the latter (now very rare) work while looking through
the many editions that the Rhys-Davids family had bequeathed to the
university at Peradeniya, Sri Lanka (then the National University of
Ceylon).  These had all the marks of "ex libris" editions, ranging
from scholarly marginalia to sentimental personal effects folded into
the pages (and in some cases, apparently, these were not disturbed by
any readers before myself!). I recall in particular a clipping from a
newspaper that was pasted into one of these old (and rotting) tomes,
immortalizing a letter to a newspaper's editor that C.A.F. Rhys-Davids
had written, requesting a correction to her husband's obituary, as it
had mistakenly stated that he was survived by his son —the latter had
already died in the First World War.  We might say that the period of
scholarship set in motion by D'Alwis's pioneering work ended at about
the time of the First World War: the sequence of scholarly
publications on classical grammar comes to an end with H.T. DeSilva's
translation of the Bālāvatāro in 1915 (also the year of Duroiselle's
second edition), followed by a century of relative abeyance.

Everything about D'Alwis's book reflected the tone of frontier
scholarship in its day.  It is a patchwork of hastily made
observations, notes, and "hearsay" about texts that were, in some
cases, not even correctly identified.  However, it served its purpose
well: what had been an utterly obscure area of scholarship became the
subject of several articles in major journals (e.g., of Royal Asiatic
Society of Bengal) and a number of scholars were spurred into action.
The missionary Francis Mason had already been researching Pāli grammar
from his remote garret in Burma, and his (much better) study of the
subject followed in 1868.  The frenetic pace of the work was partly
inspired by the fear that whatever texts could not be secured in short
order might soon cease to be extant, and, in Pāli grammar in
particular, D'Alwis and Mason both thought that they were racing
against the clock to find some of the last Kaccāyana manuscripts, or
else the work would be lost forever.  Were these fears well founded?
They were founded in the observed brutality of European colonialism,
with its "Scorched Earth Policy", looting and burning of temples, and
indifferent destruction of all things "native" in the tides of
rebellion and repression across the Theravada colonies.  It is indeed
remarkable that a text as common as Kaccāyana could be considered
endangered in the 1860s, but the real danger to all "native" culture
and literature had been demonstrated all too often in living memory.
The abominable murder of thousands of Sinhalese, and the reduction of
their material culture to ashes, in the repression of the 1817-8 Uva
Rebellion, was doubtless recalled in the smaller Matale rebellion of
1848, quelled with the public execution of a Buddhist monk.  We need
not rehearse the timeline of the three Anglo-Burmese wars that defined
this period on the mainland; Buddhist texts were not only looted by
the British, but also burned in pyres to break the spirit of native
resistance.

Thus, in looking back on a period of extraordinary European scholarly
activity, we must be aware that it was also a period of
all-too-ordinary European brutality; the expectation of some of these
scholars was that they were studying a culture that would soon be
dead, viz., one that they had a hand in killing.  This is most
infamously the case with Max Müller, and was also true of
less-renowned F. Mason.  Although I would not attempt a complete list
of European language publications on Pāli grammar in the period, we
may name some of the major works as follows: D'Alwis (1863), Mason
(1868), Senart (1871), Gray (1883), Tha Do Oung (1899), Tilby (1899),
Vidyabhusana (1901), Duroiselle (1906), DeSilva (1915).  A large
number of journal articles and works of early lexicography are omitted
from this short list.

All of this suffices to say that the present work was not written in
the rarefied atmospohere of an obscure study, but, in fact, Duroiselle
wrote in the context of much more lively competition in this field
than there is at present.  As it has been my excruciating duty to
become familiar with much of the scholarship from that era, I should
here draw attention to several distinctive features of Duroiselle's
work:
• Duroiselle made extensive use of the Jātaka and post-canonical Pāli
literature in forming his idea of the "correct" use of the language.
Thus, e.g., he lists many  forms of declension and conjugation that
are not included in the tables of other authors.  This can be very
useful as a scholar's reference, but it can also be more confusing (or
even deceptive) for a beginner.
• Although most of Duroiselle's grammatical observations are based on
the close reading of classical sources, he took some very modern
liberties in assigning (English) grammatical terminology and in
changing the order of the cases.  The latter is especially confusing
as the traditional names of the Pāli cases are ordinal numbers (thus,
any change in their order throws the traditional terminology into
confusion).
• While making repeated reference to himself as an accomplished
Sanskritist, Duroiselle sometimes conflates Sanskrit and Pāli roots
(and rules), although, to give due credit, he also makes some keen
observations as to how the languages differ.  The confusion is likely
to be much greater for a beginner than an advanced student, as
Duroiselle seems to make references back and forth between Sanskritic
and Pāli concepts (and roots) with the assumption that his reader will
be able to readily distinguish and interpret them separately.

I have prepared this edition largely as a labour of re-formatting,
re-aligning, and introducing minor corrections to the third edition
(primarily at the behest of Bhante Nyanatusita).  In less than ten
years, encodings and digital file formats have changed so much that
this was indeed a necessary labour.   It may well be complained that
the tables, etc., are inadequate (certainly they are not beautiful!)
but I regret that the scope of my work was simply the correction of
thousands of tab-separated values that comprise these tables, and not
raising the standard of the text to a new level.  The fourth edition
is well suited to one purpose at least: the rapid search and reference
that a digital format allows.

Eisel Mazard, Vientiane, Lao P.D.R., 2006