Grammar & Lexicography

What this is

This is the infrastructure of literacy: the grammatical and lexical apparatus by which the north learned to read Pali and to write its own Tham script. The catalogue files all 389 witnesses under a single clean label, Philology, and the titles resolve into three tight families.

First, the saddā / vyākaraṇa tradition — Pali grammar proper, the Kaccāyana school inherited from Pagan: Saddabhedacintā, the Saddavutti and its ṭīkā, the treatises on sandhi (euphonic combination — Pali sūt sondhi, Sap santhi), and the Vuttodaya, the classic manual of Pali prosody, here both bare and as a nissaya (Nisai wuttotanya). Second, the lexicography — the sap (from Sanskrit śabda): Pali-and-vernacular word-lists and glossaries, Nama sangkaha, Nama sap pali palivan, the collected vocabularies a student needed at his elbow. Third, and most immediately useful to a modern reader, the vernacular primers: manuals like Tamra rian akson Lanna, "a treatise for learning the Lanna letters" — the schoolbook by which the script itself was taught.

So this is the meta-genre. Every other corpus in the collection — canonical, chronicle, wichaa — stands on this one, because none of it is legible without the grammar and the glossary that made Pali construable in the north. It matters to the esoteric material in a specific way: the saddā sciences are also what let a ritualist parse and compose the Pali katha (spell-formulae) at the heart of Magic & Ritual — grammar is the key that turns a line of Pali into a working spoken formula.

The shape of the collection

This is the most technically "canonical" genre in the collection by its physical and linguistic profile. It is 97% palm-leaf — the highest of any genre, a pure scholastic support — and it carries the highest share of monolingual Pali anywhere in the collection (38%, against 59% Pali-and-Lan Na): a grammar of Pali is very often written in Pali. The dated witnesses cluster hard in the 19th century (202 of 267), tailing back to the 16th.

Geographically it repeats the canonical pattern — Phrae 50%, and Wat Sung Men alone supplying 40% of the genre — which is a fact about one library, not one region (see below).

Notes

• A library artifact, sharpened. Wat Sung Men in Phrae holds 154 of these 389 witnesses — 40% of the genre from one temple. A great teaching monastery's library will inevitably over-represent the teaching corpus; read the province and temple counts here as where the grammars were kept and copied, not where grammar was uniquely studied.
• One label, three uses. "Philology" collapses (a) the saddā / vyākaraṇa grammars, (b) the sap lexicons and glossaries, and (c) the vernacular script-primers. The primers especially deserve pulling out: they are few, but they are the pedagogical key, and directly relevant to anyone — human or OCR — learning to read this collection today.
• A Tham Lao seam. Nearly a fifth of the witnesses (74, 19%) are in Tham Lao rather than Tham Lanna — a markedly higher cross-border share than the canonical genres, and a pointer to how the Pali grammatical curriculum travelled across the Lao–Lanna world.
• Directly useful now. Because this genre is the reading apparatus, its glossaries and primers are the natural companions to the image-download and OCR phases — the collection's own built-in dictionary.
• Copying range. The dated witnesses run from the late 16th to the late 20th century, clustering hard in the 19th — the age when the northern teaching monasteries were copying their curriculum most intensively.