Arabic-L:LING:Why do electronic Wehr?

[Dilworth Parkinson]

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Arabic-L: Mon 21 Aug 2006
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1) Subject:Why do electronic Wehr?

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1)
Date: 21 Aug 2006
From:Marc Van Mol <Mark.VanMol at ilt.kuleuven.be>
Subject:Why do electronic Wehr?

Hello,

I wonder why there should be an electronic version of the dictionary  
of Hans Wehr?  The dictionary of Hans Wehr is quite outdated.  I have  
been working on the compilation of Arabic dictionaries for Dutch for  
more than 20 years and I can assure everybody that the dictionary of  
Hans Wehr contains many obsolete words which are not used anymore.   
Moreover, there are many words (5%) from our database based on a  
modern corpus) which do not occur un the dictionary of Hans Wehr.   
Another problem is the fact that it is a translation from German,  
which means that it contains many uncertain meanings.  See for an  
evaluation my article in: Van Mol, Mark (2000) The development of a  
new learner's dictionary for 	Modern Standard Arabic, the corpus  
linguistic approach, In Proceedings of 	the Ninth EURALEX  
international Congress, Stuttgart, 8-12 august 2000, pp. 831-836.   
The dictionary of Wehr is also not conceived according to modern  
standards of lexicography, which are most clearly defined in, among  
others, the cobuild dictionaries of English.  The question is why the  
English speaking community doesn't start a common effort to make an  
up to date electronic dictionary according to modern principles in  
lexicography.  Technically speaking there is no problem because we  
have developed a bidirectional relational database for dictionaries  
on which our paper dictionaries are based.  Many elements in this  
database are reusable for other languages, which coule mean an  
important saving in time.

The problem is that for the compilation corpora will have to be  
translated in detail, which is a painstaking work demanding a great  
effort.  Many of the things we would like to know are not registered  
in Hans Wehrs' dictionary which is basically a word to word  
translation dictionary with almost no information on collocations,  
frequency etc.  For more details on the work we have done about  
Arabic lexicography and compputer technology, you can visit our website:

http://www.kuleuven.ac.be/ilt/arabic/index_en.htm

Greetings,

Mark Van Mol
Institute for Living Languages
Faculty of arts
Dekenstraat 6
B 3000 Leuven
Belgium

tel. + 32 16 32 56 83
fax. + 32 16 32 56 56
E-mail:  Mark.VanMol at ilt.kuleuven.ac.be

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End of Arabic-L:  21 Aug 2006