ORAEC and VÉgA
Dear guys, do you know what digital tools are available for Egyptian lexicography? Yes, you name it, TLA and Ramsès. But these great tools do not focus on lexicography, but on the text corpus. You can see this, for example, in the fact that for a word you get all the occurrences that the corpus offers. If you are looking for all occurrences of a word, that is fine, but lexicographic entries with lexicographic information like in a printed dictionary are not offered by TLA and Ramsès. Lexicographically evaluated information is offered by two tools. The first is AED. AED has more than 30000 lexical entries for Egyptian words. Each entry gives a translation of the Egyptian word, up to five occurrences, the best collocation partners, words belonging to the same root, and overviews of spelling, hieroglyphs used, dating, origin, readings, and grammatical usage. Cool! ORAEC links to AED; for each lemmatized word form in ORAEC, there is a link to a lexical entry in AED. Perhaps an example will clarify what we mean. https://oraec.github.io/corpus/oraec7303-1.html is the sentence view of the first sentence of oraec7303. Each word form has its own column where information such as spelling or translation is collected. One row also provides a link to the AED, so that one can get additional lexicographic information about a word. The second digital project providing lexicographically evaluated information is VÉgA. Again, the focus is on lexical entries that provide spellings, translations, comments, and references to other dictionaries. For an overview of the project, see the article by Martin, Anaïs: VÉgA (Vocabulaire de l’Égyptien Ancien): A New Definition of a Dictionary. In: Ancient Egypt, New Technology. The Present and Future of Computer Visualization, Virtual Reality, and Other Digital Humanities in Egyptology. 2023, pp. 281-297. Folks, check out this resource! It is worth it!
It would be cool if we link not only to AED but also to VÉgA, right? This is where the new TLA helps us. An important innovation there is the linking to external projects. So the lemmas in the TLA indicate which VÉgA entry they correspond to. We have scraped the data and adapted it to ORAEC. So now there is a mapping between the lemmas used in ORAEC and the entries in VÉgA. We provide this mapping on the overview page of an entry. For example: the bird ꜣpd has the overview page https://oraec.github.io/corpus/107.html. For the occurrences, it says in brackets:
for more info check AED link: 107 & VÉgA entry
Now the interested reader can look up not only directly in the AED, but also in VÉgA.
That’s it for today! Have fun with ORAEC and with VÉgA!
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