GERMANIC LEXICON PROJECT.

September 1, 2005 by 3 Comments

The Germanic Lexicon Project is the new incarnation of what was the Indo-European Language Resources page.

The goal of this project is to create comprehensive online coverage of the lexicons of the early Germanic languages. All of the data is available free of charge and free of copyright or other intellectual property encumbrance…

The Texts page contains numerous copyright-expired dictionaries and grammars of the older Germanic languages. These are in various stages of being digitized. Some are available only as scanned page images. Others are available as online text, sometimes corrected and sometimes not.

The Search page allows you to search some of the texts in the collection.

The Messages board is a message board where you can discuss the early Germanic languages and digitizing historical linguistic materials. You can use it like an ordinary chat board. The message board system has an extra feature: you can make editorial comments “in the margins” of the online dictionaries. If you comment on a dictionary entry, your comment is available when that entry is displayed in the search system.

Cleasby-Vigfusson, Zoëga, Bosworth-Toller, Wright’s Grammar of the Gothic Language… it’s all here! The internet just keeps getting better and better. (Via the new incarnation of Glosses.net, regarding which I will permit myself a quiet “Calloo, callay!”)

Comments

  1. dearieme says
    September 2, 2005 at 10:09 am

    Where can one learn about bits of early German that hang on into modern times? Could that be an explanation of how we counted in the playgound of my youth: yin, twy, thry, fower…..

  2. John Cowan says
    August 1, 2018 at 8:45 pm

    dearieme-2005: No, those are direct descendants of Old English ān, twegen, thrēo, fēower, just as Modern English one, two, three, four are.

  3. languagehat says
    August 21, 2025 at 11:06 am

    The site is still there, but as Sean Crist (whose baby it is) says on the About page:

    […] Unfortunately, it was just too big of a project. After poking at it for several years and then taking a week of vacation time to try to finish it, I reluctantly came to the conclusion that it was too big of a project for me to finish while holding down a full-time corporate job. I had to set it aside, although I still hope that some change in my future fortunes will allow me to get back to it.

    In July 2020, I finally had a chance to move the project to my own server, and do some housecleaning to reflect the fact that there’s isn’t currently a way to volunteer. I fixed several things that were broken.

    […]

    The website code I wrote in 2003 is totally out of date, and it wouldn’t make sense to put the work into adapting it to handle UTF-8. I know a heck of a lot more now about how to not build web applications. New code would be the only way forward. If I get a chance, I’ll work on it at some point.

    […]

    As of this writing, I’m 51, and I’m now at a point in my life when retirement is on the distant horizon. The project isn’t aligned with my current career direction, but it is something I could pick up as a full-time retirement project. We’ll see.

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