We have a great announcement today. Along with our German research partners as part of the KELLIA project, we are releasing an online Coptic lexicon linked to our corpora.
For over three years, the Berlin-Brandenberg Academy of Sciences has been working on a digital lexicon for Coptic. Frank Feder began the work. Frank Feder began creating it, encoding definitions for Coptic lemmas in three languages: English, French, and German. The final entries were completed by Maxim Kupreyev at the academy and Julien Delhez in Göttingen. The base lexicon file is encoded in TEI-XML. This summer Amir Zeldes and his student, Emma Manning, created a web interface. We will release the source code soon as part of the KELLIA project.
It may still need some refinements and updates, but we think it is a useful achievement that will help anyone interested in Coptic.
Entries have definitions in French, German, and English.
You can use the lexicon as a standalone website. For the pilot launch, it’s on the Georgetown server, but make no mistake, this is major research outcome for the BBAW.
We’ve also linked the dictionary to our texts in Coptic SCRIPTORIUM. You can click on the ANNIS icon in the dictionary entry to search all corpora in Coptic SCRIPTORIUM for that word.
The link also goes in the other direction. In the normalized visualization of our texts, you can click on a word and get taken to the entry for that word’s lemma in the dictionary. You can do this in the normalized visualization in our web application for reading and accessing texts (pictured below), or in the normalized visualization embedded in the ANNIS tool.
Of course there will be refinements and developments to come. We would love to hear your feedback on what works, what could work better, and where you find glitches.
On a more personal note, when Amir and I first came up with the idea for the project, we dreamed of creating a Perseus Digital Library for Coptic. This dictionary is a huge step forward. And honestly, I myself had almost nothing to do with this piece of the project. It’s an example of the importance and power of collaboration.
