Languages Resources for Poorly Endowed Languages : The Case Study of Classical Armenian

Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020), pages 3145–3152 Marseille, 11–16 May 2020 c⃝ European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC 3145 Languages Resources for Poorly Endowed Languages : The Case Study of Classical Armenian Chahan Vidal-Gorène, Aliénor Decours-Perez École Nationale des Chartes-PSL, Calfa 65 rue de Richelieu (75002 Paris), MIE Bastille - 50 rue des Tournelles (75003 Paris) chahan.vidal-gorene@chartes.psl.eu, alienor.decours@calfa.fr Abstract Classical Armenian is a poorly endowed language, that despite a great tradition of lexicographical erudition is coping with a lack of resources. Although numerous initiatives exist to preserve the Classical Armenian language, the lack of precise and complete grammatical and lexicographical resources remains. This article offers a situation analysis of the existing resources for Classical Armenian and presents the new digital resources provided on the Calfa platform. The Calfa project gathers existing resources and updates, enriches and enhances their content to offer the richest database for Classical Armenian today. Faced with the challenges specific to a poorly endowed language, the Calfa project is also developing new technologies and solutions to enable preservation, advanced research, and larger systems and developments for the Armenian language. Keywords: Lexical Database, Handwritten and Typewritten Document Recognition, Less-Resourced Language, Collaborative Resource Construction & Crowdsourcing, Corpus, Digital Humanities, Multilinguality, OCR 1. Introduction The Armenian language is an Indo-European language written since the Vth century, when the monk Maštoc‘ created the alphabet in 405 AD, according to the Ar- menian historian Koriwn. Early on a rich and prolific literature arise: translation of the Bible and of Greek and Syriac patristic texts, historiographies, theological works, etc. Classical Armenian, or grabar (”from writing”), in a strict sense refers to the language of the Vth century literary and religious texts, and in the broad sense to the written language that develop and expand through the Middle Ages and Modern Times. Indeed, preserved as a ”reference point” (Lamberterie, 1992) the use of Classical Armenian continues on until the XIXth century, growing richer with technical terminology taken from the Ancient Greek through the translation of secular works. In contrast with grabar, the Modern Armenian or ašxarhabar (”from the world”) – with two variations: Western Armenian (arewmtahayerēn) and Easten Armenian (arewelahay- erēn) – arose as a literary and written language from the second half of the XIXth century. Nevertheless, the classical language remains the foundation for specialists of the Armenian language and the key language for all philological, theological, linguistic or historic studies requiring Armenian sources prior to the XIXth century. Today 31.000 complete Armenian manuscripts reached us, all subsequent to the IXth century, they only represent 5% of the total production of the Armenian copyists (Mahé, 2005 2007). Very numerous manuscripts fragments have also survived and some might constitute witnesses prior to the IXth century, among which many ancient texts whose master copies in Latin or in Ancient Greek have been lost. Some institutions have undertaken the digitization of their collection of Armenian manuscripts or fragments, thus easing the consultation of these resources, which still …

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