Curation of Dutch Regional Dictionaries

Curation of Dutch Regional Dictionaries Henk van den Heuvel1, Eric Sanders1, Nicoline van der Sijs2,3 1CLS/CLST, Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands 2Meertens Instituut, Amsterdam, the Netherlands 3NCI, Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands {h.vdheuvel, e.sanders, n.vandersijs}@let.ru.nl Abstract This paper describes the process of semi-automatically converting dictionaries from paper to structured text (database) and the integration of these into the CLARIN infrastructure in order to make the dictionaries accessible and retrievable for the research community. The case study at hand is that of the curation of 42 fascicles of the Dictionaries of the Brabantic and Limburgian dialects, and 6 fascicles of the Dictionary of dialects in Gelderland. Keywords: data curation, dialect, dictionary 1. Introduction Between 1967 and 2008 the Dictionaries of the Brabantic and Limburgian dialects (Woordenboek van de Brabantse Dialecten, WBD, and Woordenboek van de Limburgse Dialecten, WLD) have appeared in press. They consist of three parts, published in 69 fascicles. The first part concerns the agricultural terminology of the Southern Dutch dialects, the second the technical terminology (industries, trades), and the third the general lexicon. WBD and WLD are prepared at the Radboud University in Nijmegen and set up by the famous Dutch dialectologist A.A.Weijnen. At Ghent the Flemish counterpart (Woor- denboek van de Vlaamse Dialecten, WVD) is compiled. As a follow-up, in 2002 the Dictionary of the Guelders Dialects (Woordenboek van de Gelderse Dialecten, WGD) was set up at Radboud University. It consists of three fascicles (House 2005, Man 2006, World 2008) for two regions: the Veluwe and the Rivierenland (river area). The dictionaries were elaborated with a database progam. All these dictionaries are onomasiologically organized, i.e. as an entry the (Standard Dutch) concept is given, followed by the various dialect forms, and the places where these forms are used. These places are given in codes consisting of a capital letter plus three digits, the so-called Kloeke codes, named after the dialectologist G. Kloeke who invented the system (Kruijsen and van der Sijs, 2010). Figure 1 shows the location of the provinces covered by the dictionaries. The dictionaries associated with the provinces are in red capitals. Part III of the WBD and WLD dictionaries has from the start been elaborated with a database program. Within the NWO project D-Square the data have been made digitally available on a website, to which is added a cartographic tool (van den Heuvel et al., 2015; de Vriend et al., 2006). However, the first and second part of the dictionaries exist in print only. The 42 fascicles of these two parts, together 9706 pages, contain an enormous amount of dialect data that are on the verge of disappearing. These data are invaluable for scientific research into the Dutch dialects and for research on lexical semantics in general1. In the past, efforts have been made to digitize the data of the WBD and WLD. The printed fascicles have been scanned and the Omnipage program has been trained to read the phonetic representation of the dialect forms. The result was poor, since especially in the …

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