1 . Project Overview

This project was first presented at the DHANT conference in Grenoble (Sept 2-4, 2015), then at the Forum de la Méditerranée (Marseille, March 17-19, 2016)1.

It is based on TEI xml and comes as a reversible Greek-Arabic lexicon. At present, this work is based on scientific, namely medical, literature. As I take great care of encoding everything, it will eventually be possible to take into account, for example, any particular treatise, topic or the work or the works of any particular translator depending on one's wishes, eg. Hippocratic or Galenic treatises,Ḥunayn's or Ḥubayš's translations, and so forth.2

2 . What is encoded

This lexicon does not only incorporate technical terms; it also covers all the Greek particles and their Arabic equivalents, in an attempt at a better understanding of this aspect of Arabic lexicography and syntax. This is also why I take into account all the forms of the Arabic verbs: the aim, here, among other things, is to assess better how the various modifications of the idea conveyed by the ground-form compare with the Greek active, middle and passive voices.

3 . Technical Literature... and more

Which is also interesting is that technical literature also covers every-day language in all its aspects. This is the case with the Hippocratic Epidemics treatises which I am currently working on, but also with other treatises wich I plan to include in the medium term, such as Galen's Hygene (De Sanitate Tuenda), which had a huge success in medieval Islam. We are here in matters related to the art of living and refinement in the Islamic society.

4 . Methodology

I would put forward that one should ideally encode such a dictionary at the same time he is progressing in the critical edition of the texts which supply the sources for the entries. In my opinion, this is of paramount importance, as editing a text requires the editor to make choices—and to explain them— with texts that have been thouroughly strutinized. This makes some difference between dictionaries which are merely compiled from other sources and dictionaries which derive from critical editions.

One more reason to promote this way of working is that it may give the scholars—or the graduated students who are doing their PhD— the opportunity of doing critical editions while adding new entries which are part of a larger project, which is of course very instructive as such, but also may lead to large online dictionaries, online classical editions and constellations of linked data from all these sources. This is a very interesting way up-and-coming editions should explore.

5 . Technicalities

As said above, the Greek-Arabic-Greek lexicon follows the rules of the TEI xml, with a few modifications. Greek and Arabic words are automatically linked to the online dictionaries of the Perseus Project, namely the Greek-English Lexicon of Liddell, Scott and Jones, and the Arabic-English Lexicon of E. D. Lane.

The paper I read in Grenoble was based on a short extract (Hippocrates, Epidemics, Book 2, 1.1). The corresponding lexicon may be seen online. However, the comprehensive version of this lexicon, is not yet released to the public. It is quite different from the online extract, as it includes a search engine which is capable of handling simple and complex searches, either in Greek or in Arabic. To take an example, the current version allows to search either Greek entries or Arabic roots, then narrow down the ouput according to various grammatical criteria.

The first public version of this lexicon is expected to be released at the same time the tools that I am currently coding are released, viz.:

1. arabluatex, for encoding Arabic;
2. ekdosis, for encoding TEI xml compliant critical editions;
3. dictionary, for encoding TEI xml compliant multilingual dictionaries.

All of these are or will be published under the terms of the GNU GPL License v3 or later.

• 1. See the online document Panorama des recherches et études méditerranéennes en sciences humaines et sociales, Travaux présentés lors du Forum de la Méditerranée en sciences humaines et sociales, MuCEM, Villa Méditerranée, Marseille, 2016, p. 30.
• 2. In comparison to the online version of GALex, this lexicon is nothing more than a very modest project, but it is also designed to serve a different purpose (see here): as it is made of all the matches that one can find as he is progressing in critically editing the Greek original, the number of references for each entry or sub-entry is not limited. This particular feature brings this project closer to an index than a lexicon.