LRC Blog
Building an Indo-European Lexicon
Jonathan Slocum
N.B. The abstract below introduces a talk presented to the UT Linguistics Colloquium; a paper published on the LRC website as Building an Indo-European Lexicon Using Print and Online Dictionaries constitutes a readable outline for this talk.
February 3, 2010
We describe our development of an Indo-European Lexicon, comprising our "Pokorny Master" listing of Proto-Indo-European (PIE) etyma and, in principle for each etymon, a list of Indo-European (IE) reflexes derived therefrom (see, e.g., the PIE root *ag- 'to drive, lead'). PIE etyma are described by Semantic Fields, and reflexes are (being) indexed by language in sorted lists. We focus chiefly on procedures for automated collection and glossing of reflexes in English and other IE languages using published dictionaries -- some available in electronic form, one (an index) scanned, and the rest accessed manually.