1. Overview
The dictionary is currently stored in a MS Access database, available for download at http://www.wulfila.be/gothic/download. Here is an overview of the relevant tables and relations:
The structure of the entire database is avaliable here.
In its present form, the main table Lemmata is actually a conflation of two different dictionaries: a ‘flattened’ view on the headwords in Streitberg's Gotisch-Griechisch-Deutsches Wörterbuch (1910) and a more formal dictionary used internally for generating paradigms and tagging the text. The former is human-oriented, aimed at glossing words, the latter machine-oriented, aimed at searching and analysis.
Ultimately, the goal is to separate these entities, keeping the formal dictionary in the database and storing Streitberg's dictionary in an external XML document, encoded using the TEI DTD [Text Encoding Initiative P4, chapter 12: Print Dictionaries]. They would be linked by means of corresponding identifiers. In the future, other TEI-encoded dictionaries could be linked to the database as well, e.g. the glossary to Wright's Grammar of the Gothic Language (1910), available in ad-hoc XML at the Germanic Lexicon Project.
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Fields concerning Streitberg's dictionary are prefixed with WS. The main table has separate entries for every lemma, related lemma (TEI
<re>), homonym (both TEI<superEntry>or<hom>) or cross-reference found in Streitberg's dictionary. It contains only information that can reasonably be stored in a relational DB, i.e. orthographical form(s), additional information on the form, grammatical class and additional information, location in the dictionary, sort key, flags marking the lemma as reconstructed, conjectured or ‘besserungsbedürftig’ etc. The list of headwords is complete and has been manually checked twice, as recorded in the timestamps. The translation field, however, is an unstructured ‘stub’, providing basic, plain-text transcriptions of the layout of the entry, German glosses and notes and occasionally a few examples.Table WSClasses lists the most common grammatical labels used by Streitberg (e.g. ‘Akk.Plur.’). Less frequently used labels are stored directly in field WSClassOverride (e.g. ‘Akk.Pl.’), overriding the value of WSClass; WSClassOverrideReason names the reason for doing so (in this case: alternate spelling). The distinction is a leftover from earlier attempts to normalize Streitberg's labels. It is probably unnecessary and can be discarded, since grammatical information is more precisely described in the formal dictionary. It could, however, be used to provide normalized values for some labels in a TEI edition, e.g.
<gram norm="Akk.Plur.">Akk.Pl.</gram>. -
The formal, machine-oriented dictionary defines ‘normalized’ lexical data, used to generate the lexicon (the set of all possible word-forms) and tag the text (the set of all recorded word-forms or tokens). It is closely tied to the Gomorph application, a formal description of Gothic morphology. In contrast to Streitberg's dictionary, where Part-of-Speech (TEI
<pos>) and inflection (TEI<iType>) are generally merged into one label (e.g. ‘st.V.3’), each lexeme is linked to exactly one PoS and one inflectional category, by means of foreign keys pointing to other tables. When there are several alternative reconstructions, one is chosen as the primary form, the others are stored as separate lemmata with a pointer to the main lemma (in field Parent). Table Gomorph lists the inflectional classes defined in the Gomorph specification. POSTags defines Part-of-Speech classes. LexicalParameters contains input for the Gomorph engine, typically features that override the class definition (such as noun aba (Mn) having irregular dative/genitive plural abnam/abne).
The exact nature of an entry in the combined table is determined by field LemmaType. Most of the time, there is a simple one-to-one correspondence between the formal lemma and Streitberg's entry. As mentioned above, this is not the case for homonyms, related lemmata and alternative spellings and/or reconstructions, which are usually grouped together in Streitberg's dictionary (many-to-one relation). Streitberg's cross-references to other entries are omitted from the formal dictionary (zero-to-one relation). A few headwords are missing in Streitberg's book (one-to-zero relation).
Using the type and parent fields, it is relatively straightforward to generate the ‘skeleton’ of a valid TEI document, including all entries and super-entries but minus the actual <sense>-element, which would initially be limited to a partial, plain-text transcription.
