Οι πηγές του Ιστορικού Λεξικού της Νέας Ελληνικής της Ακαδημίας Αθηνών

Abstract

The Historical Dictionary of the Academy of Athens records the Modern Greek language both in its standard form and its dialectal varieties from the beginning of the 19th century down to the present day.  The combination of these two aspects makes it a historical and dialectal dictionary of Modern Greek, the only one of its kind. The linguistic material comes from an extensive indexed archive of approximately 4 million excerpts, which was created through the selective excerption around 6,000 dialectal and colloquial material sources. The corpus of these sources is further divided into primary and secondary. The primary sources which constitute ca. 60 – 70% of the archive, include: (a) oral text material collected by the researchers of the Historical Dictionary and by external collaborators, from all parts of the country using a method of direct interviews, and (b) literary and non-literary texts written in dialectal and colloquial language. The secondary sources, which form the remaining 30 – 40% of the linguistic material, consist of dictionaries, grammars and treatises, collections of regional studies, bibliographies, etc. Both the advantages and disadvantages of the various source types during the compilation of the Historical Dictionary are discussed in detail. Moreover, the recent use of the new information technologies (i.e. online machine readable corpora, digitized searchable written sources etc), which open up unprecedended possibilities for both the quality assurance and the enrichment of the existing linguistic material is also commented upon.