3 ms·

If we're going down the rabbit hole of projects that take forever to complete, I'd welcome any update about Sweden's ultimate dictionary, which was started in 1

by GCA10 9y ago

If we're going down the rabbit hole of projects that take forever to complete, I'd welcome any update about Sweden's ultimate dictionary, which was started in 1898 and still isn't finished. As far as I can tell, partial publication of new volumes, offering up words that start with early letters of the alphabet, has taken us as far as V. So the end is perhaps in sight. But I'm guessing that a lot of Swedish usage on words starting with A, B, etc. has changed since the initial publication. So it may be impossible to ever come up with a dictionary that is both comprehensive and finished. The unabridged Oxford English Dictionary had a tough fight with the same problem, but periodic digital updates now seem to have this under control Wikipedia entry is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svenska_Akademiens_ordbok https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svenska_Akademiens_ordbok

Someone 9y ago
That seems on par with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woordenboek_der_Nederlandsche_Taal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woordenboek_der_Nederlandsche_..., a similar work for Dutch, which took from 1849 to 1998 to complete. To get to the finish, they did move the goalposts a bit by adding "as used before 1976" at some point. It also was digitized fairly early by having two groups of people in, IIRC, India type out a copy in duplicate and comparing the results. (No, you don't have to speak a language to type out a manuscript)
- tgb 9y ago
  Not knowing the language might even help in accuracy, though probably not in speed! I've heard that copy editors would sometimes read the text backwards as that made spelling errors more obvious. When read as part of a sentence it's easy to skip over a spelling mistake.
  - thaumasiotes 9y ago
    Different classes of transcription error tend to come from literate vs illiterate transcribers. I believe haplography and dittography (writing a sequence of letters once when it should be written twice, or twice when it should be written once) are more common from illiterate transcribers.
svat 9y ago
There's a Sanskrit to English Dictionary project (An Encyclopedic Dictionary of Sanskrit on Historical Principles) going on at Deccan College, Pune — it started in 1948, and as of 2010 was still on the first letter "a" (either 8[1] or 30[2] volumes published already though). If it keeps up the pace it may take longer than the Swedish dictionary :-) There's a sample (part of an) entry from it available online[3]. [1] http://archive.indianexpress.com/news/60-years-later-sanskrit-dictionary-stuck-in-first-letter/619837/ http://archive.indianexpress.com/news/60-years-later-sanskri... [2] http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/pune/Now-refer-to-ancient-Sanskrit-words-online/articleshow/44439427.cms http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/pune/Now-refer-to-an... [3] http://www.sanskrit-lexicon.uni-koeln.de/scans/awork/homepage/pd-sample.php http://www.sanskrit-lexicon.uni-koeln.de/scans/awork/homepag...

by GCA10 9y ago

Someone 9y ago

That seems on par with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woordenboek_der_Nederlandsche_Taal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woordenboek_der_Nederlandsche_..., a similar work for Dutch, which took from 1849 to 1998 to complete. To get to the finish, they did move the goalposts a bit by adding "as used before 1976" at some point. It also was digitized fairly early by having two groups of people in, IIRC, India type out a copy in duplicate and comparing the results. (No, you don't have to speak a language to type out a manuscript)

tgb 9y ago
Not knowing the language might even help in accuracy, though probably not in speed! I've heard that copy editors would sometimes read the text backwards as that made spelling errors more obvious. When read as part of a sentence it's easy to skip over a spelling mistake.
- thaumasiotes 9y ago
  Different classes of transcription error tend to come from literate vs illiterate transcribers. I believe haplography and dittography (writing a sequence of letters once when it should be written twice, or twice when it should be written once) are more common from illiterate transcribers.

svat 9y ago

There's a Sanskrit to English Dictionary project (An Encyclopedic Dictionary of Sanskrit on Historical Principles) going on at Deccan College, Pune — it started in 1948, and as of 2010 was still on the first letter "a" (either 8[1] or 30[2] volumes published already though). If it keeps up the pace it may take longer than the Swedish dictionary :-) There's a sample (part of an) entry from it available online[3]. [1] http://archive.indianexpress.com/news/60-years-later-sanskrit-dictionary-stuck-in-first-letter/619837/ http://archive.indianexpress.com/news/60-years-later-sanskri... [2] http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/pune/Now-refer-to-ancient-Sanskrit-words-online/articleshow/44439427.cms http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/pune/Now-refer-to-an... [3] http://www.sanskrit-lexicon.uni-koeln.de/scans/awork/homepage/pd-sample.php http://www.sanskrit-lexicon.uni-koeln.de/scans/awork/homepag...