Union Académique Internationale

Project n°18, adopted in 1958

Viljem Trencner

He was born in Copenhagen. His full name was Carl Wilhelm Trenckner, but he himself used always to write it V. Trenckner. Having passed through a German middle-school in Copenhagen he received private instruction and matriculated at the university (1841), where he first turned to the study of classical philology (esp. the lectures of Prof. Madvig), but at the same time applied himself to the study of Persian, Arabic, Syriac, Aethiopic and other Oriental languages, not to speak of modern European languages (as German, English, French, Spanish, Italian and Russian), in which he preserved a vivid interest all his life. The great results of the famous journeys of Rask and Westergaard in Persia and India by and by drew his main interest towards the East, and so he never acquired any university degree in classical philology. A moderate fortune enabled him to indulge in linguistic studies at his ease during his youth. As may be seen from his written papers he was especially proficient in Arabic and Persian. From this little sketch of Trenckner's life one would not easily gather that we have here the biography of one of the most ingenious of Pali scholars. Indeed we have omitted all that pertains to his Indian studies. These he began already before 1850 under the guidance of Westergaard (Sanskrit, Zend and Pehlevi), and we see from his papers that in 1854 he was busy also with the study of Bengalī, Hindī, Sinhalese and Burmese. At the same period, during which he read the whole of Mahābhārata, he also acquainted himself with Fausbøll's transcripts of Pali texts, which he copied for himself, correcting them by collating the originals. Later on he made transcripts on his own account of most of the Pāli manuscripts in the Copenhagen Collection and of some others lent from London. All his transcripts are very fine and scrupulously worked out in the stenographic system specially invented by Fausbøll for this purpose.

The dictionnary

It may be appropriate to recall the purpose and the aims of this dictionary as stated in the preface to Volume I on p. X: "We have called this work a 'Critical Pāli Dictionary', both because Trenckner's material was from the first arranged on a critical basis, and because the nature of many modern editions of the texts imposes on us the obligation of re-testing the readings. The dictionary thus professes to be critical, but its criticism comes under the head of the 'lower criticism' only, inasmuch as we are working exclusively on the Pāli Canon and the younger books appertaining to it. Our plan has simply been to supply verified material for that higher criticism which checks the Canon of Theravāda [p. VIII] with the documents left by other Buddhist schools as well as with the deeper strata of Jain lore. Thus we have attempted to show what may be achieved by Pāli alone, but must leave it to others to draw the conclusions of further comparative study. We also believe that the fact of our having, according to Trenckner's plan, included Nomina propria and the Titles of books and their separate sections, as well as the most necessary items from the traditional Pāli grammar — from Kaccāyana to Saddanīti, — will contribute to render the material we are here supplying more generally useful". Through the collaboration of the Royal Danish Academy and the Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur of Mainz (Germany), three volumes were published (1948,1960 and 1992). An online database - A Critical Pāli Dictionary Online - is maintained by the Data Center for the Humanities at the University of Cologne in cooperation with the Pali Text Society. The project was originally carried out by the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies (ToRS) at the University of Copenhagen.