[Lexicog] new research

[Mike Maxwell]

ali72678 wrote:
> i am ali and i want to study the lexicographical development in URDU. 
> what should i do to take the plunge?

I would say one of the first things is to find out what is already going 
on in Urdu lexicography.  I presume you know about the Wiktionary 
(http://www.wiktionary.org/), although that doesn't appear to have 
progressed very far in the case of Urdu.

You should definitely check into the work that Dr. Sarmad Hussein is 
leading at CRULP, including an on-line dictionary at 
http://www.crulp.org/oud.  The last time I looked, this dictionary 
required a username and password for access.  There is probably contact 
information at the website.

The University of Chicago also has some projects with South Asian 
dictionaries, mostly old ones (out of copyright), see 
http://dsal.uchicago.edu/dictionaries/platts/ and 
http://dsal.uchicago.edu/dictionaries/shakespear/ for example.

Some other on-line Urdu dictionaries that I know of are 
http://biphost.spray.se/tracker/dict/index.html, 
http://www.urduword.com/Home/index.cgi, 
http://www.centrelink.gov.au/internet/internet.nsf/multifilestores/lexicon0405/$File/lexicon0405ur.P 
(this last a lexicon of beauraucratese), http://urduseek.com/, 
http://messene.nmsu.edu:8082/dictionaries/download.php?lang=Urdu, and 
http://www21.brinkster.com/urdudict/.

Given that Hindi is closely related to Urdu, one might explore expanding 
an Urdu dictionary using a Hindi dictionary.  Of course you have to be 
careful, because the largest difference between Hindi and Urdu is 
precisely in their vocabulary (aside of course from their writing systems).

The Linguistic Data Consortium is working on a project to gather texts, 
lexicons etc. of Urdu.  I believe--but am not sure--that they are 
working with the above-mentioned Dr. Hussein.

Given that Urdu is a well-studied language, you should probably also get 
in touch with people who teach it or do research on it, perhaps taking 
some courses at the university level, so as to get a handle on issues 
like morphology.  I don't know whether you live in Pakistan or 
elsewhere, so it's hard to make any recommendations.

Be prepared to deal with character encoding issues, although this tends 
either to be much worse than with Hindi (some Urdu web pages I've seen 
have essentially been gifs, with no character-encoded data whatsoever), 
or much better (Urdu largely lacks the deplorable multi-encoding problem 
of Hindi: if you find Urdu text on-line, it's likely to be Unicode).

Good luck!

   Mike Maxwell
   CASL, U of Maryland


 
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