Using the Oracc glossaries

Most Oracc corpora are at least partially lemmatised; that is, the words in them are tagged in order to generate language glossaries. An Oracc corpus usually has more than one glossary (for instance Akkadian, Sumerian, Names) but they all work in essentially the same way. This page describes how to use them.

Accessing glossaries | What you see | Header | Outline Pane | Main Pane

Accessing a project's glossaries

You can access a project's or corpus's glossaries by one of two routes:

• The Glossaries list on the Hub Page of a project takes you to the home page of each glossary. From there you can browse or search the entire glossary.
• In Text Item Mode, each transliterated word in the corpus may be linked to a glossary entry. When you place your cursor over the word, the outline entry pops up; and when you click on the word you are taken to the full entry.

What you see

When you go to the front page of an Oracc glossary, you will see the screen split into three parts:

• the coloured header at the top;
• the outline pane below it, to the left;
• and the main pane in the centre of the screen.

The contents of the header and outline pane stay mostly the same as you move through the glossary. The contents of the main pane change, though, depending on your actions in the header and outline pane.

Header

You can use the coloured header at the top of the screen to navigate your way around the glossary, and to perform searches. It is divided into three different zones, from left to right and top to bottom:

• the same navigation zone as in the main corpus, for moving to different parts of the website;
• the usual search zone, for finding signs, words and phrases; but now it will search only in this particular glossary;
• and in some contexts you will also see the pager zone, for paging through different texts, catalogue entries, and search results.

Outline Pane

The left-hand outline pane lists the following items, which you can use to browse the glossary:

ALL

This links to a list of single-line summary entries for every item in the glossary.

the letters A-Z (or a subset of them)

Each of these gives you single-line summary entries for every item in the glossary with that initial letter.

Main Pane

Summary Glossary Entries

You can access outline glossary entries via the Summaries or the indvidual letters in the Outline Pane, or by using the search box. An outline glossary entry looks like this:

ana [TO] PRP (2x) "for; to"

It has five components:

Citation form (e.g., ana)

The dictionary headword or lemma. Akkadian nouns are always given in the nominative singular (e.g., awīlu) and verbs in the infinitive (e.g., alāku), in an un-mimated form called Conventional Akkadian.

Guide word (e.g., [TO])

The basic translation.

Part of speech (e.g., PRP)

Abbreviation such as N = noun, V = verb, PRP = preposition, AJ = adjective, AV = adverb. For more details see the documentation on lingusitic annotation.

Attestations (e.g., (2x))

The number of times this word occurs in the (lemmatised part of) the current corpus.

The context-based senses (e.g., "for; to")

The various context-based meanings of the word, as used in the current corpus.

Clicking on the coloured component of the outline entry will take you to the corresponding full glossary entry. Depending on the context, it may appear in the main pane or in a pop-up window.

Full Glossary Entries

Full glossary entries look the same, whether they are in the main glossary pane or a pop-up window. They are divided into three parts:

• The top line is a summary, showing the citation form (dictionary headword or lemma), guide translation(s), part(s) of speech, and number of instances in the online corpus. You can click on this number to see all the instances in context.
• The next section shows periods, spellings (transliterations), and normalisations of all the attestations in the corpus. For Sumerian words, it also shows their base forms and morphological forms. Click on any of these to see them shown in context. A pop-up window will appear, showing the relevant lines of manuscript or composite text, with the glossary word highlighted. You can then click on the coloured designation (publication number or composition name) to see the whole transliteration and translation.
• The third and final section lists the different meanings of the word within the corpus, showing their relative frequencies. Click on any of the frequencies to see the headwords in context.

Eleanor Robson

Eleanor Robson, 'Using the Oracc glossaries', Oracc: The Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus, Oracc, 2019 [http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/doc/help/visitingoracc/glossaries/]