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Germanic Lexicon Project
Message Board
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Author: Sean Crist (Swarthmore College)
Email: kurisuto at panix dot com
Date: 2005-09-21 09:14:34
Subject: Re: Word Pedigree
What you're describing is actually one of my major goals in this project.
Lots of people might want to just use the existing dictionaries without modification, and that's fine. My own purpose in digitizing the dictionaries is to write scripts to parse the entries and build computer-readable representations of the etymological relationships among the words.
I've got plans for software to search for previously undetected cognate sets, to automaticaly find problems in previously (but erroneously) proposed cognate sets, and so on.
I presented a paper at last year's LSA meeting about a markup scheme for etymological data. Here it is:
http://penguin.pearson.swarthmore.edu/~scrist1/publications/crist_etym_markup.pdf
--Sean