[Lexicog] A bit of orientation needed! (Dictionary Solftware)

[Mike Maxwell]

jorcaiba wrote:
> For the last two years I've
> been trying to develop a multilingual dictionary of Latin and ALL the
> Romance languages, but haven't found the right (free) software for it.

Most dictionary software available on the open market or for free is 
designed for bilingual dictionaries.  Multilingual dictionaries 
introduce other problems, especially what the data structure is going to 
be, and how you link entries in different languages together.

For example, if you were to gloss the words from all these languages in 
English (I don't know whether that's what you're planning to do), you 
have to deal with the fact that a word in one language may have a set of 
senses that is overlapping but different from the set of senses for a 
possibly cognate word in another language; or the parts of speech may 
differ, or other grammatical categories (like gender, which had a 
three-way distinction in Latin but a two-way distinction in most of the 
Romance languages).

It may not sound like this should be much of a problem, but I'm betting 
it will turn out to be really messy to come up with an adequate data 
structure, and to remain consistent in the use of the data structure if 
you use a free-form database.  If you use something non-free-form (like 
a relational database), then you have a programming issue.

Sorry, that's probably not the answer you want to hear.  But 
dictionaries are much more complex than they might appear, and 
multi-lingual dictionaries are much more complex than bilingual 
dictionaries.  Perhaps someone in this group has had more experience 
than I have; I've worked with multi-dialectal dictionaries, where some 
of the same problems arise.

(BTW, do you really mean *all* Romance languages?  including Aragonese, 
Catalan, Romansh, Romanian, Occitan, Ladino, Galician...)

    Mike Maxwell
    CASL/ U MD


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