A web-based version of Bhikkhu Ñanatusita’s Pali Noun Declension Table

The Watercooler
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Hellew,

I made an HTML version of Bhikkhu Ñanatusita’s Pali Noun Declension Table:

https://palinotes.net/grammar/nouns/nyanatusita-table/nyanatusita-table.html

I welcome corrections and suggestions!

Here’s the About bit:

This table is based on Bhikku Nyanatusita’s noun declension table. Bhante Nyanatusita includes the following comment:

“The endings in italics are rare and are mostly found in verses or later post-canonical Pāli. The em-dash (—) indicates that the content of the cell is th same as the cell to the left. Consulted grammars: Ānanda Maitreyya, Buddhadatta, Duroiselle, Fahs, Geiger, Perniola, Warder, Wijesekera. The file can be freely copied and distributed for personal non-commercial purposes. (C) 2005 Bhikkhu Ñāṇatusita, Forest Hermitage, Kandy, Sri Lanka.”

I have made the following significant change: all merged cells have been separated into individual cells. I have done this because my goal is to generate this table automatically from the database (although it is currently a “static” HTML table). Once that is working I hope to add back in the merged cells.

My goal with this project is to base the tabular presentation on a database. The information is stored as a JSON file, which you can also access here: declension_table-lexicon.json, if you like.

I have more plans for this project, here’s my to-do list:

  • Make it useful on smaller devices like smartphones.
  • Make it possible to search the whole table.
  • Create a new, alternate view of the database which is sorted by endings, rather than a table.
  • Make the various columns toggleable.
  • Make rare forms toggleable.
  • Make it possible to input a word and have it highlight all suffixes which are possible endings of that word.
  • …your idea here…

My thanks to John Kelly for helping access and wrangle various formats of the document.

I welcome corrections, which I may well have introduced in the process of putting this table together! You can email me at pathall@gmail.com, or post on the Pali Reddit at https://pali.reddit.com.

12 Likes
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Awesome work! Please keep going!!

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Thanks!

I’m working on a table renderer so I can make similar tables from pronouns, verbs, and so forth. I think it would also be cool to break the noun stuff down into smaller “per declension” tables (it’s useful as a comprehensive reference, but pretty terrifying to newcomers!).

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:pray:t4: :clap:t4:
Wonderful Thank you! Easier to search HTML than a PDF!

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Glad it’s useful to you!

Sort of relevant: I recently noticed that Firefox has improved its “find in page” functionality to include settings for whether diacritics are significant and whether matches should be whole words or not. That can be tremendously useful when searching for affixes like ā or aṃ, for instance.

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So good! I keep coming back to this.

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This is very excellent. Thank you. :smiley:

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