Lexical Portraits

Part of A Visual Dictionary and Thesaurus of Buddhist Sanskrit

0.1 Preface

Lexical Portraits is a series of in-depth analyses of core Buddhist Sanskrit vocabulary launched by the Buddhist Translators Workbench in 2021, as part of the lexicographic programme run by the Mangalam Research Center.

Each portrait is meant to be perused in conjunction with the corresponding entry in the Visual Dictionary and Thesaurus of Buddhist Sanskrit. While the dictionary entries allow interactive exploration of our manually annotated citations, the portraits offer our own interpretation of those citation as well as of corpus data. Contrary to the dictionary, where all charts are automated, the Portraits’ data-visualizations are manually tailored to each lemma. We recommend to always check the info tabs that accompany the portraits’ graphs, as the statistics and principles used to generate the graphs may vary from headword to headword.

More information about the editorial strategy and theoretical underpinnings of the Lexical Portraits series can be found in Ligeia Lugli (2021) Dictionaries as Collections of Lexical Data Stories: an alternative post-editing model for historical lexicography. eLex 2021 proceedings.

0.1.1 coverage

The vocabulary we intend to cover in our Lexical Portrait is a subset of the headwords we are going to cover in the Visual Dictionary and Thesaurus of Buddhist Sanskrit. We prioritize words that are relatively frequent in the corpus, are difficult to translate, and lexicalize important concepts in Buddhism.

0.1.2 corpus

The Lexical Portraits are based on a ~7 million words corpus of Buddhist Sanskrit literature that we are currently expanding thanks to funding from the Khyentse Foundation.

The corpus is available on Zenodo; the info tabs of each portrait detail which version of the corpus has been used for a particular portrait.

Graphs and information based on manual annotations draw on the subset of the corpus that is used for our dictionary. Please refer to the Corpus section of the Visual Dictionary and Thesaurus of Buddhist Sanskrit for a list of the texts included on the subcorpus we use for manual annotation.

0.1.3 team

The Lexical Portraits are created by Ligeia Lugli on the basis of linguistic annotations by Luis Gamaliel Quiñones Martinez.