By Ines Dallaji, Ines Gabsi, Stephan Procházka, Veronika Ritt-Benmimoun, Gisela Kitzler, Bettina Leitner, Ines Ben-Brahim
Vienna 2016
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The TUNICO Dictionary was created as one deliverable of the project Lexical dynamics in the Greater Tunis area: a corpus based approach, which was supported by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF, P25706-G23; https://www.acdh.oeaw.ac.at/tunico/). The project was conducted in close cooperation of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the University of Vienna and the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Large parts of the research of this project were situated at the crossroads of variational linguistics and language technology.
The dictionary was not only built on data from the corpus of spoken language that was compiled in the same project, but also on two additional sources: data elicited from interviews with young Tunisians and lexicographical material taken from published historical sources dating from the middle of the 20th century and earlier. The most important of these is Hans-Rudolf Singer’s monumental grammar (1984; almost 800 pages) of the Medina of Tunis. Singer’s data was systematically evaluated and integrated into the dictionary, all the material being indicated by reference to the book. Additionally, other resources including (Nicolas 1911, Marçais/Guîga 1958-61, Quéméneur 1962, Abdellatif 2010) were also consulted in order to verify and to complete the contemporary data. The diachronic dimension will help to better understand processes in the development of the lexicon (for more details see Moerth, Prochazka, & Dallaji 2014).
The dictionary can serve as an index to Singer’s grammar. However, we do not claim completeness of the material for the time being.
The project was embedded in the activities of the two large-scale pan-European research infrastructure consortia in the humanities, CLARIN (Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure) and DARIAH (Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities). Both infrastructures have grown out of the ESFRI Roadmap and were officially endorsed by the Commission of the European Union after a preparatory phase of several years (Budin, Moerth, & Durco 2013).
The Arabic dialect of Tunis as spoken today by the majority of the city’s inhabitants is a contact variety influenced by a vast population influx from all over Tunisia during the 20th century. It can be regarded as a prestige variety since speakers of other Tunisian Arabic dialects tend to shift towards it. Tunis Arabic is widely used in oral and visual media (theater, film, slogans). It is, however, rarely written except in informal letters, newspaper cartoons or advertising slogans. (By Ines Dallaji)
Through the query interface, you can search for words or groups of words in the dictionary. By simply entering a word such as ʕaṛbi and pressing the ENTER button on your keyboard you will trigger the query. Results matching your query will be displayed below the input field.
Mind that all queries are case sensitive.
The transcription used in the dictionary is for the most part DMG. If you need special characters such as ā, š or ʕ, click on the respective letters in the character table.
The preview option will show you a list of tokens that start with the characters you entered so far.
It is possible to search in particular fields of the dictionary. Wildcards are applied on the token level.
ktb | Roots | All entries with the Arabic root ktb | Try it! |
book | Trans. (English) | All entries with an English sense book | Try it! |
diminutive | subc | All diminutives | Try it! |
VIII | subc | All form VIII verbs | Try it! |
adverb | POS | All nouns. This will take same time!!!! | Try it! |
The interface also supports a simple query language. | |||
[root="ktb"] | All entries with the root ktb | Try it! | |
[lem="gōl"] | All entries with an Arabic token gōl | Try it! | |
[etymLang="English"] | All entries with an English etymology | Try it! | |
You can use more than one query term. | |||
[root="ktb"] & [pos="verb"] | All verbs with the root ktb | Try it! | |
[root="ktb"] & [pos="noun"] | All nouns with the root ktb | Try it! | |
[root="ktb"] & [pos="verb"] & [subc="I"] | All form I verbs with the root ktb | Try it! | |
You can make use of simple regular expressions. Try the following examples: | |||
.*ūni | All fields | All entries containing a string ūni | Try it! |
bal.* | Arabic | All entries containing an Arabic lemma token containing a string with bal | Try it! |
kt.* | Roots | All entries with an Arabic root starting with kt | Try it! |
To explicitly anchor a pattern at the head (=beginning) of a token, make use of "^". "$" anchors the pattern at the tail (=end). | |||
^kt.* | Roots | kt kt at the beginning of a string followed by zero or more characters Try it! | Try it! |
The interface makes use of the XQuery function matches whenever it detects a regular expression. To get an overview of the options have a look at www.xqueryfunctions.com.
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Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities (ACDH)
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