Collection of Assyrian dictionaries in digital format.
Oraham's Dictionary of the Stabilized and Enriched Assyrian Language and English
by Alexander Joseph Oraham
Bio: http://www.atour.com/people/20010702c.html
Published: 1943
Development: 25 years
Words: 21,000
Description: Text search available for English (using Adobe PDF reader). Syriac characters are not searchable at this time.
A Dictionary of the Dialects of Vernacular Syriac
by Arthur John Maclean
Bio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Maclean
Published: 1901
Development: ? years
Words: ?
Description: Text search available for English (using Adobe PDF reader). Syriac characters are not searchable at this time.
Changelog (2018/09/11): Added English text recognition for searchability. Created content bookmarks.
Colloquial Syriac As Spoken In The Assyrian Levies
by Lieut. R. Hart, MBE
Bio: ?
Published: 1926
Development: ? years
Words: ~805+
Description: Text search available for English (using Adobe PDF reader). Syriac characters are not searchable at this time. The word count above is of the English base words in the vocab section (50 pages). The words in the other sections have not been counted, but an estimate might be about 350-450, cumulatively.
The ultimate goal of this repository is to provide a digital dataset of Assyrian words/definitions in a programmatically consumable format, such as JSON/CSV.
All the fields that one would expect from the common dictionary should be included, along with some additional data when available.
- Syriac spelling (Eastern and Western)
- Pronunciation in translated language
- Type of word
- Definition in translated language
- Definition in Assyrian, itself (both Eastern and Western)
- Example usage (multiple sentences)
- Verb tenses
- Source (the dictionary from which the data has been adapted)
- Possible place of origin
- Possible language of origin (Akkadian, Aramaic, borrowed from a known language, etc.)
The first step is to collect dictionaries (in digital format) that are available for free.
Use technology to extract data from digital formats and adapt it into JSON/CSV datasets. Manual entry of data should not begin until available sources have been completely parsed.
Once the datasets are available, mobile and web developers will be able to develop Assyrian dictionary, thesaurus, and language-based apps. It's evident that there are many who have interest in developing an Assyrian dictionary app, but - apparently - the datasets haven't been available in a programmatically consumable way.
At the time of writing this, there are a couple of mobile app developers who are trying to produce Assyrian dictionary apps; however, the apps depend on an internet connection. This is due to the fact that they have to use the available web service APIs (most of which depend on the same web service).
This repository should not include dictionaries that are not free. No potential harm should be caused to any author and/or publisher, not just to respect copyrights and avoid affecting their financial outcome, but to also prevent discouraging authors from producing dictionaries.
Available dictionary web services should not be scraped to collect data. This would not only be harmful to the authors/publishers of the web-based dictionary, it would also be harmful to the language, as it could discourage further development of the affected dictionaries.
The most well-developed web-based Assyrian dictionary has been under continuous development for over a decade with almost 40,000 words. With that having been stated, this dataset is not going to be developed overnight.