I was interested in the relationship between the various Middle Indo-Aryan
dialects, and began to study them comparatively, trying to use forms in one dialect to
shed light on forms in other dialects. Because Middle Indo-Aryan includes Pāli, the
language of the Theravādin canon and the commentaries upon it, as a matter of course I included the study of Pāli in my investigations. My interest in Pāli led to my being invited to join the Council of the Pali Text Society and I was persuaded to help with the continuation of the Pāḷi Tipiṭakaṃ Concordance, which had come to a standstill after the death of its first editor, E.M. Hare. This was essentially a philological undertaking, in that it consisted of presenting for publication the contents of the Pāli canon, word by word, with the material analysed and set out by case forms, tenses, etc., as was appropriate. The words were given a meaning merely for reference purposes, but no interpretation of meaning, or discussion from a doctrinal point of view was involved.That work in turn led to an invitation to become involved with A Critical Pāli
หน้า 7 responsibility (to the end of Volume II, i.e. to the end of the vowels) was completed at the end of 1990, some 66 years after the first fascicle of the dictionary was published by Helmer Smith and Dines Andersen in 1924. That work for A Critical Pāli Dictionary was also primarily a philological undertaking, since it involved an analysis of the usage of each word listed and the assignment of meanings for each usage, but not, for the most part, a discussion of the doctrinal importance of each word and the part it played in Buddhism.