Selected Papers.

• Author: Jamison, Stephanie W.
• Position: Book review

Selected Papers. By COLETTE CAILLAT. Bristol: PALI TEXT SOCIETY, 2011. Pp. lxxiv + 387.

This collection of articles by the reknowned French specialist of Middle-Indo-Aryan languages and linguistics and of Jaina studies, Colette Caillat (1921-2007), is very welcome, though it represents only a portion of her impressive output. Since the volume is published by the Buddhist-focused Pali Text Society, specifically Jaina articles are excluded, although Jaina studies were perhaps closest to her heart. Fortunately, however, the editors and the PTS had a flexible and capacious sense of what was appropriate for the volume, and the articles chosen range widely across linguistic and doctrinal lines, not limited to articles treating only Buddhist topics in languages specific to Buddhism. It contains twenty-seven articles and seven reviews of fascicles of the Critical Dictionary of Pali (CPD), with publication dates ranging from 1960 to 2003. (Only a single review of 1957-58 predates the first article reproduced here.) The volume also contains an illuminating introduction to and appreciation of Caillat's scholarly work by Nalini Balbir and Oskar von Hinuber (who presumably functioned as de facto editors of the volume, though no editors are officially listed in the front matter) and a complete bibliography of Caillat's publications. There are also rather abbreviated indices to the whole volume, of words, subjects, and passages; given the richness of detail in the articles themselves, these indices are unlikely to be of much help to the researcher. With one exception the articles are arranged chronologically rather than by topic, and they are reproduced in their original form with original pagination, though the book is also through-paginated.

The collection opens with a programmatic article from 1970, "Pour une nouvelle grammaire du Pali," based on lectures delivered at the Institute of Indology at the University of Turin. In this piece her scholarly approach is fully on display--deeply concerned with textual evidence, basing grammatical analyses not on forms detached from their context but on the grammar that emerges from text, sensitive to meter and to other indirect clues to linguistic structure such as register, and to the linguistic reality often partly concealed by orthography, alive to the interplay of archaism and innovation in the language and to the linguistic processes that reconfigure older features of language in new structures, and eager to...