The college administration is working aggressively towards making digital copies available within a year. Presently, all the published volumes remain accessible in hard copy format. We are planning student-centric activities in the near future so that there is hands-on learning,” said Sharma. “We need to showcase to the students the efforts and processes required for dictionary-making. We need readers for the vast volumes of scriptures and literary works lying unread,” he said.īut young scholars such as Bhav Sharma, Editorial Assistant and Project’s Secretary, are now reaching out to the public aimed to inspire a few. “Overall, language studies have remained on the backfoot. But there is a real shortfall of Sanskrit linguists. Prof Joshi’s team is the crucial link between the past and the future, and has a big responsibility to keep Sanskrit alive. Though there are 46 alphabets in Sanskrit language and several more decades of work lay ahead towards completion of this project, it is estimated that in the end, it will be a dictionary with a total vocabulary of 20 lakh words. The 35 volumes published so far contain about 1.25 lakh vocables (word). The Encyclopaedic Sanskrit Dictionary, once ready, will be three times larger. It contains 4.5 lakh words in 17 volumes. ![]() ![]() The Woordenboek Der Nederlandsche Taal (WNT) is another large monolingual dictionary in Dutch. It is once again proof-read by the scholars and the General Editor, before it is finalised as a dictionary entry.” said Sarika Mishra, an Editorial Assistant on the Project.įor comparison, the Oxford English dictionary, with 20 volumes and 2,91,500 word entries so far, remains among the most popularly used dictionaries. Upon finalising, the article of one word is readied and sent to the press. This is then proof-read and sent to the General Editor for his first review. Once the maximum possible meanings are found, the first draft, called an article, is published. “Sometimes, a word can have anywhere between 20 to 25 meanings as it varies depending on the context of use and books. This helps a reader to understand the historical development of the meaning of the word. That is why, it is an encyclopaedic dictionary wherein words have been arranged according to the chronological order of their references appearing in the text.įor example, the word beginning with the letter ‘ अ ‘, like agni, will have all the citations from Sanskrit texts starting with Ṛgveda and the references from the texts following Ṛgveda, chronologically arranged. In addition to the word meaning, the dictionary also provides additional information, references, and context of the respective word used in a particular literature. While this dictionary contains words in alphabetical order, it follows historic principles in stating the meaning. They have also been scanned and preserved digitally. All these paper slips have been well preserved, alphabetically, in one of the rarest scriptorium – the soul of the dictionary – inside over 3,057 specially-designed metal drawers. It took 25 years for these scholars to complete the word extraction process from around 1,464 books to generate one crore reference slips. It was signed off by the creator of the slip and its verifier. They mentioned details like the book title, context in which the word was used, its grammatical category (noun/verb etc.), citation, commentary, reference, exact abbreviation, and date of the text. In the non-digital era, these scholars noted details of every new word onto small paper reference slips. The founder of India’s oldest Department of Modern Linguistics in Deccan College, conceived this unique project in 1948 and served as the dictionary’s first General Editor. They covered subjects like the Vedas, Darśana, Sahitya, Dharmaśāstra, Vedānga, Vyakarana, Tantra, Epics, Mathematics, Architecture, Alchemy, Medicine, Veterinary Science, Agriculture, Music, Inscriptions, In-door games, warfare, polity, anthology along with subject-specific dictionaries and lexicons. Between 1948 – 1973, around 40 scholars read through 1,464 books spread across 62 knowledge disciplines – starting from the Rigveda (approximately 1400 B.C.) to Hāsyārṇava(1850 A.D.) – in search of words that could be added to this unique dictionary.
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