A Rigvedic Dictionary (words beginning with vowels)

Research project P 14411 A Rigvedic Dictionary (words beginning with vowels) Thomas KRISCH 08.05.2000 The project "A Rigvedic Dictionary (words beginning with vowels)" represents the first part of a larger project, a dictionary of the whole Rigveda. The Rigveda is one of the most important religious texts of India, actually it is supposed to be the most important one. As the oldest text of Sanskrit (Vedic) it is of invaluable importance for a lot of fields of research. The projected dictionary is intended to provide an up-to-date tool of reference for Comparative Philologists, Linguists, Indologists, theologists and other philologists and classical scholars interested in Vedic and Sanskrit culture. We have already got a dictionary of the Rigveda at our disposal: the monumental work by Hermann Graßmann. It has been published 125 years ago and appears to be out of date in many respects though it still is a very useful work. Our projected dictionary is intended to reflect the latest state of research in Indology and Indo-European studies, especially with respect to semantic and formal interpretations of all word-forms in the Rigveda. In addition to that, some modern linguistic concepts will be incorporated. Especially prominent among the recent linguistic ideas integrated into the dictionary are the concept of semantic case ("theta roles"), the notion of semantic features and the structure of syntactic arguments. Of our dictionary you may also expect a complete morphological analysis of all the forms occurring in the Rigveda. In order to enhance the seeking possibilities, we plan to enclose a CD-ROM to the printed volume, as soon as the entire project is finished. On this CD-ROM you can find the text in Word 2000 format, in Rich text format and in ASCII. The current part of the project (words beginning with vowels) will last two years, the whole project is estimated at 6-8 years.

The project "A Rigvedic Lexicon (words beginning with vowels)" represents the first part of a larger project, a dictionary of the whole Rigveda. The Rigveda is one of the most important religious texts of India, actually it is supposed to be the most important one. As the oldest text of Sanskrit (Vedic) it is of invaluable importance for a lot of fields of research. The dictionary will provide an up to date tool of reference for comparative philologists, for linguists, indologists, theologists and other philologists and classical scholars interested in Vedic and Sanskrit culture. We have already got a dictionary of the Rigveda at our disposal: the monumental work by Hermann Graßmann. It has been published more than 125 years ago and appears to be out of date in many respects though it continues to be a useful work. Our dictionary, which was started through this project, reflects the latest state of research in Indology and in Indo- European studies, especially with respect to semantic and formal interpretations of all word-forms in the Rigveda. In addition to that, some modern linguistic concepts are incorporated. Especially prominent are recent linguistic ideas integrated into the dictionary such as the concept of semantic case ("theta roles"), the notion of semantic features and the structure of syntactic arguments. You may also expect a complete morphological analysis of all the forms occurring in the Rigveda. The main language of translation is German. The most important semantic and syntactic information will also be presented in English, though. In order to enhance the searching mechanisms, we shall enclose a CD-ROM to the printed volume, as soon as the entire dictionary will be finished. On this CD-ROM you will find the text in PDF format, in Word 2000 format, in Rich Text format and in ASCII. Thanks to this project we could finish about 60% of the first part (words beginning with "a", which covers about one eighth of the tokens to be dealt with in the Rigveda) of the dictionary. This first part will be published in 2004. Furthermore we have already dealt with a large number of words beginning with other vowels than "a" (a part of "u"; the whole of long "u", syllabic "r", "e", "ai", "o", "au").