IE etymological dictionary

[Sean Crist]

On Wed, 19 Jan 2000, Hans Holm wrote:

> In spite of the dated and questionable quality of the old
> "Indoeuropaeisches etymologisches Woerterbuch" by Pokorny, many scholars
> would like to have a CD-ROM-version of it.

> Does anyone know the state of the work on a new IE etymological dictionary
> at LEIDEN, NL? I tried an e-mail to Kulikov at pcmail.LeidenUniv.nl, but that
> was returned by the net. Regarding to the Leiden-University homepage,
> Kulikov is not listed in their staff nor did I find any hint on such a
> project.

> Does anyone have an up-to-date information on the Leiden project?
> Does anyone know of digitalized versions of the 'Pokorny IEW' What font
> has been used?

Pokorny is still under copyright; the most recent edition is copyright
1959.  It will be a great many years before that edition passes into the
public domain.  The U.S. government keeps extending the term of copyright
longer and longer; they just bumped it up another 20 years a few years
ago.

Now, if the publisher (Bern: Franke) wanted to release the dictionary on
CD or to license it to some other publisher to distribute on CD, they
could do so.  Of course, since the dictionary is under copyright, this
online version would only be available to those individuals and libraries
that can afford it.  If you're a high school student with a burning
interest in Indo-European studies but little money, or if you're a college
student in a low-income country with barely any library but with an
Internet connection, you _could_ access these materials if they were
freely available; the Internet has essentially eliminated the considerable
costs of publishing.  For reasons of profitability, however, an artificial
scarcity is maintained.

It's for this reason that I'm interested in taking old IE-related
materials whose copyright has expired and placing them online for free,
with the intent that volunteer effort can work to bring the materials up
to date.  If volunteer effort can produce a first-rate and entirely free
operating system, I'm sure it can produce a set of quality online
IE-related materials; we simply need to do it.

I've been poking in a small way at putting IE-related materials online,
but I'm champing at the bit to do this on a much larger scale.  It's one
of the biggest temptations which distracts me from getting my dissertation
done.  The next volunteer effort I want to organize is to create free
online corpora of Old High German and Old English.  There is an online
corpus of OE, but regrettably, its creators are asserting copyright on
these 1000-year-old cultural artifacts and are refusing to allow them to
be freely shared, which means e.g. that I can't build a free web service
where you can click on any word in a text to get dictionary information.
I think this is wrong, and that the response should simply be to create a
separate corpus which is under no copyright restrictions, using printed
editions whose copyright has expired.

Over the last few months, I've been slowly putting together a list of all
the known Old High German documents with an aim toward parceling them out
to volunteers for typing or scanning; you tell me how many pages you'd
like to do, and I'll mail them to you (this worked extremely well for an
Old English glossary which I organized last summer; it's online now, and
anyone can use it). Unfortunately, I have to repeatedly tell myself that I
need to make the dissertation my first priority; otherwise I'd already be
asking for volunteers for an OHG corpus.

I'm throwing this out here because I'm certainly not the only one capable
of doing this.  Anyone who wants to can find a pre-1923 dictionary or
document which would be of use in creating a free body of Indo-European
related materials, and organize volunteers to put sections of it online
(or do the whole thing yourself, if you like).  There are certainly people
on this list who could make recommendations for texts, if you're not sure
what to work on.  For example, I've got a 60-page glossary of Old High
German which I scanned, but which needs a good deal of hand correction, if
someone would like to work on that.

  \/ __ __    _\_     --Sean Crist  (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu)
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