Lex

The Lex system serves as a computational infrastructure, built in cooperation with the Liberal Arts Instructional Technology Services (LAITS), designed to facilitate the construction of online dictionaries networked through an etymological core.  For any given language family, the Lex system allows speaking communities, scholars, and enthusiasts the ability to collaboratively create dictionaries for all the languages of the family.  Moreover, where the histories of individual words are known, these relationships can be specified in the system, so that users can trace word histories across languages in the family.

Background: IELex

The LRC published the initial version of the Indo-European Lexicon (IELex) over two decades ago.  Since then it has been under continuous development.  This allows users to look up the origins of a vast collection of words from the lexica (plural of lexicon) of all the Indo-European languages.  Those origins are words — termed etyma (singular: etymon), or simply roots — in the lexicon of Proto-Indo-European (PIE), the parent language of the family as a whole.  The IELex provides a dictionary of the PIE etyma along with their reflexes, or descendents, in the various daughter languages of the family.

But why stop there?  Why only Indo-European?  The LRC started with Indo-European languages because the techniques of historical linguistics used to trace back language origins were first developed in that context.  But there are many other language families in the world, and they merit the same deep study and development of resources.

The Idea: Beyond IELex

The LRC has thus, over the past few years, collaborated with LAITS to build a new infrastructure for IELex, called simply the Lex system.  This new system allows us to create a similar IELex structure for any language family: a dictionary of the etyma in the proto-language (parent of the family), together with all their reflexes in the descendant languages of the family.

But the Lex system is much more: the initial version of the IELex is just a dictionary of a single language, PIE, and a list of words in daughter languages, like Spanish, whose etymologies we already know.  But that list does not include all words in the languages of the family, like Spanish, because we have not yet worked out the origin of all Spanish words.  The Lex system allows us nevertheless to create a full-fledged Spanish dictionary — and Romanian dictionary, and Pašto dictionary, and Hindi dictionary — containing all the words of each language, and link those dictionaries to one another through the etymological dictionary of the family’s proto-language, like PIE.

That is, the Lex system provides the infrastructure for an interconnected web of dictionaries all linked to one another through a central etymological dictionary.  And it provides a platform for speaker communities, scholars, and enthusiasts to contribute to the expansion and refinement of the underlying data.  It’s a true platform for bringing the scholarly understanding of the history of language development to the general public.