Pali Grammar

The Pali Canon is the only example of such complete preservation and therefore of utmost importance for our understanding of early Buddhism. A glance at recent publications reveals a keen interest in examining Buddhist doctrines based on original Pali texts. As a result, a series of textbooks has been published to meet this need. While these works can draw on a long tradition of research with regard to Pali phonology and morphology, they have little access to precisely that part of grammar which teaches how individual word forms are combined into sentences and how these, in turn, are connected into longer textual units. To date, there is no comprehensive syntactic description of Pali, with the exception of a limited number of specialized studies. Yet only through a comprehensive knowledge of syntactic rules can one truly understand the composition of these texts and decipher their underlying meaning. Pali Grammar: Syntax is the third volume of a comprehensive Pali grammar, which for the first time presents a fully developed Pali syntax that accomplishes this task. It describes in great detail the syntactic rules of Pali using a variety of selected text examples, all of which are presented in the original Pali and then translated word for word. To ensure that this Pali syntax is accessible not only to specialists, all technical terms used to formulate these rules are precisely defined and illustrated throughout with original texts. For anyone who wishes to read and study Buddhist texts in their original language with all their distinctive linguistic features, this presentation of Pali syntax provides invaluable assistance. The first two volumes were published by the Pali Text Society. This explains why this third volume begins on page 1292.