If you want to have a closer look at Pali grammar in order to sharpen your understanding of the texts, this section will provide you easy ways to get acquainted with what is the most useful to know about it.
- 1. Pali-English Dictionary
- This is a search engine in the Concise Pali-English Dictionary by A.P. Buddhadatta Mahathera. You can use it for instant lookup of most Pali words and as well check their gender and etymology. It is quite flexible as for example if you are looking for 'āṇāpāṇa' you can simply enter 'anapana' without using any diacritics. Download the dictionary directly here.
- 2. Declension of nouns
- Here you can look up the declension of most Pali nouns, in order to ascertain the grammatical function of a noun in a particular sentence. For that you will need to know first the gender of that noun. Use the dictionnary to find it out.
- 3. Conjugation of verbs
- There is a great deal of variation in conjugations, but those are the main patterns.
- 4. Prefixes
- Here are the main prefixes in Pali langage, whose meaning is required to understand more precisely the idea expressed in the original text, and which may not be translatable in all its subtlety.
- 5. Suffixes and derivation
- Here you can look up the main suffixes (appart from declensions) which form Pali words and whose meaning is sometimes required for understanding some abstract ideas having no English equivalent.
- 6. Frequent irregular declensions
