Ceci n’est pas un dictionnaire. Adding and Extending Lexicographical Data of Medieval Romance Languages to and through a Multilingual Lexico-Ontological Project

Abstract

Historical lexicography of the Romance languages currently finds itself in a difficult place since the funding of some important dictionaries ended. The newly launched project ALMA will contribute to the future of these dictionaries’ content. ALMA combines methods of historical lexicography, text philology, corpus linguistics, and the history of sciences with a Linked Data approach and ontology development. It adopts a Pan-Romance perspective focusing on medieval Italian, French, and Occitan / Gascon within two knowledge domains, ‘medicine’ and ‘law’. ALMA’s goals include re-using, extending, further processing, and disseminating lexicographical data by integrating it into its work pipeline. This makes for benefits on both sides: Pivotal for the ALMA project is the anchoring of its philological and lexicological work within the framework of the entire languages examined by the dictionaries. The dictionaries, most notably those whose funding ended, profit by seeing their linguistic, textual, and historico-cultural knowledge put into new formats—e.g., Linked Data—, contexts—e.g., Pan-Romance—, and correlations—e.g., through linking to the historicized domain ontologies ALMA will develop. This introduces the valuable dictionary contents to a knowledge circulation that goes beyond their original scope and ensures its long-term re-use in a somewhat concealed way.