Glossaries
Kosh
To facilitate our lexicographical work, we began with the digitization of the more important available Middle Persian dictionaries and glossaries already before the start of the project. To make this material machine-readable, it was subsequently transformed into a simple XML format. The use of Kosh, a framework developed by CCeH, allows the user to search through several dictionaries and glossaries in one combined query.
The past century has seen the use of several conflicting systems of transcribing the Pahlavi script. The dictionaries and glossaries digitized for MPCD have therefore been supplied with a transcription according to the MPCD standard, which essentially follows MacKenzie’s Concise Pahlavi Dictionary (London 1971). Thanks to this, the users may now search through all of the digitized dictionaries without having to take into account the diverging transcription systems used by the respective authors.
The digitized materials coupled with Kosh constitute an important tool for our work. In order to allow a broader public to benefit from this tool, we have made some of the dictionaries and glossaries accessible to the scholarly community (https://www.mpcorpus.org/kosh/). The following digitized works have so far been added to the publicly accessible section of Kosh. We seek to expand this list in the future.
Bibliography
Using Kosh
- First, the user has to select the dictionaries to be searched. The simplest approach is to select all of them.
- Next, one has to select the specific field that is to be searched. In most cases, the relevant field will be “trc” (transcription), but other fields such as “sense” (meaning) are searchable as well.
- Under “Query Type”, the most relevant options to be chosen are “wildcard” and “regexp” (regular expressions).
- Through the drop-down menu “Query Size”, the results shown may be restricted to a certain number.
- By entering a keyword (e.g., a Middle Persian word in transcription, optionally enlarged by wildcards) into the “Search”-field, followed by a click on “Search”, the search is initiated.
- One is further able to define the fields to be shown in the search result: identifier (“id”), transcription (“trc”), transliteration (“trl”), meaning (“sense”), morphological features (“gramm”), attestations (“attest”), etc.
