SOAS Research Online

Abstract

Traditional lexicography requires titanic efforts and enormous resources. For many languages, such resources have never been available. As a result, they have received only limited lexicographic coverage. Today, these languages can take advantage of many of the same digital tools and strategies that have simplified and expedited dictionary-making for mainstream languages. However, the resource gap remains evident even in the digital era, with basic corpus processing tasks that lie at the foundation of contemporary ‘smart lexicography’ still constituting a challenge for many under-resourced languages. Drawing on my own experience in Sanskrit and Tibetan lexicography, this paper aims to offer some guidance as to the advantages and limitations of the application of smart lexicography to under-resourced languages. In particular, this paper suggests that in order to optimize resources, it may be advisable to prioritize high-quality lexical annotation of the corpus over highly curated dictionary entries, and to let digital tools take care of the lexicographic representation of the annotated linguistic information.