The task of finishing is momentous enough. Upcoming volumes, like R and Q, are full of question words and conditionals that have thousands and thousands of instances. The Thesaurus' projected finish date is 2050, but Holmes worries that they might not make that deadline.
Saturday, June 4, 2016
Saturday Quick Take
The Ultimate Latin Dictionary: After 122 Years, Still At Work On The Letter 'N'
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4 comments:
Fascinating.
I had 5 years of Latin, so I can appreciate the enormity of the effort.
The story reminds me of the story of Beilstein.
Beilstein is short for "Beilstein's Handbook of Organic Chemistry," an ambitious project undertaken in Germany in the late 19th century. Its purpose was sort and organize the chemical literature for just one branch of chemistry, beginning in the late 18th century. By the 1960's they had only gotten about halfway. Then the language was changed from German to English. Then came the whole searchable electronic database revolution which put the US ahead because of superior algorithms. I've lost track of where Beilstein ended up, but I'm fairly certain they never caught up.
This is exactly how the Oxford English Dictionary was created. I love projects like this: collecting and organizing knowledge as a pure good, in and of itself. These are the Great Pyramids of 19th and 20th Century Western Civ.
The Oxford Latin Dictionary is a good buy, if you follow words.
It looks like a couple thousand pages, over there on the shelf.
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