Dienstag, 19. August 2008

The project

The idea for this project was born while I was working on my conlang, Tautisca. As Tautisca is an IE-based a-posteriori languages, I can't just construct words by randomly jumbling the allowed phonemes of my language or make them up in any other way I fancy. I have to go back to the reconstructed roots and lexemes of PIE (Proto-Indo-European) and derive the Tautisca lexicon from there. For this, it is good to know which etymological developments are attestested.
A big help in this regard is Buck's dictionary, but, as all things, it's finite - it leaves out many IE languages, especially the Anatolian and Tocharian families (which, at the time when it was published, were not yet sufficiently well studied), and the number of lexemes it provides etymologies for is impressive, but still limited.
Therefore, I started to check dictionaries (general and etymological) available to me in order to obtain patterns of etymology for words that are not listed in Buck and to add etymologies for languages that Buck didn't include. I am proceding in accordance with the vocabulary needs of my main project - the translation of the New Testament into Tautisca. The entries of this blog will contain the results of this work, in articles organised (as Buck's dictionary) along English lexemes, that will investigate how these concepts are expressed in the languages covered. All entries concerning concepts will be labeled with the concept(s) they discuss, "Buck" or "Non-Buck" depending on whether the concept is discussed in Buck's Dictionary or not, allowing to search the blog by concept. All entries concerning the organisation of this blog, discussions of principles, ressources, etc. will be labeled accordingly, plus the label Meta.