Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary

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The Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary (PSD) is a project to compile a comprehensive dictionary of the

Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology and funded by both private donors and the National Endowment for the Humanities.[1] The project began under the direction of Åke W. Sjöberg (1924–2014) and Erle Leichty in 1974 and was modeled on the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, itself begun in 1921.[2] In 1976 it received its first federal funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities,[2] and in 1984 published its first section for the letter B; only 750 copies were originally printed, but more were soon published as the first batch sold out surprisingly quickly at US$40 a piece.[3] As of 1989 Sjöberg was still project director,[3] and despite retiring in 1996 continued to contribute.[4]

In 1991 Steve Tinney joined the project, and several years later decided to reconfigure the project from an envisioned 18-volume series[4] into an online electronic dictionary that could be progressively updated.[5] The new, online format was named the "electronic Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary," or ePSD. Many shorter definitions were added as opposed to the original format of long entries in the printed A and B volumes.[5] The data sets from several other projects attempting to put Sumerian texts in electronic form on the Internet are expected to be eventually integrated into the dictionary project.[6] In July 2002, Tinney became the project's director.[5]

In April 2002, the project received a two-year US $302,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities,[4][7][6] though Tinney subsequently stated that because the dictionary project had changed into more of a process with no end date, they could no longer ask for federal funds, and instead would try to establish two permanent research positions for the dictionary with US$ 3,000,000 in donations.

In 2017, a second version of the Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary was released, called ePSD2.[8] The new version of the dictionary includes listings of over 12,000 Sumerian words, phrases and names, occurring in almost 100,000 distinct forms a total of over 2.27 million times. The corpus covers about 100,000 of the 134,000+ known Sumerian texts. Staff involved with ePSD2 are Steve Tinney, director, Philip Jones, executive editor, and Niek Veldhuis, associate editor. The resource contains a glossary, corpus and catalogue, sign list, index to literature, and a variety of articles about Sumerian.[9]

References

  1. ^ "The Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary". University of Pennsylvania. Archived from the original on 2008-07-02. Retrieved 2009-02-20.
  2. ^ a b "About the PSD". University of Pennsylvania. Archived from the original on 2009-02-24. Retrieved 2009-02-20.
  3. ^ a b Browne, Malcolm W. (1989-07-04). "Scholars Scaling an Unclimbed Peak: Aramaic". The New York Times. Retrieved 2009-02-20.
  4. ^ a b c "Sumerian Dictionary Project Receives NEH Grant". Research at Penn. 2002-04-11. Retrieved 2009-02-20.
  5. ^ a b c Flam, Faye (2002-07-24). "Sumerian Dictionary to Decipher Ancient Texts". The Philadelphia Inquirer. Archived from the original on July 26, 2002. Retrieved 2009-02-20.
  6. ^ a b Frith, Susan (2003-01-01). "Spreading the Words". Research at Penn. Retrieved 2009-02-21.
  7. ^ Dan Vergano (2002-05-21). "Ancient writing system gets Internet update". USA Today. Retrieved 2009-02-20.
  8. ^ "ePSD2 2.2 (2020-12-21)". U Penn. Retrieved 2021-01-11.
  9. ^ "About ePSD2". U Penn. Retrieved 2021-01-11.

External links

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