Egyptian Dictionnary

The Unicode standard for Egyptian hieroglyphs was validated in 2009 after years of debate, though the whole community of egyptologists was not associated to the process. As to the present time, Unicode validates the most common 1200 characters of the classical period. No extension is planned in a near future. However, if one needs to work on hieroglyphic texts as a whole, conspicuously more than 10 000 characters are needed, a goal Unicode certainly do not intend to achieve. I am currently working on a dictionary of ancient Egyptian, taking on the form of a lexical data base, and on another data base inventorying all the hieroglyphs. Both are based upon the lexical and palaeographical documentation I collected over the past fourty years, the last being intended to produce a catalogue as exhaustive as possible of all hieroglyphs presently known from publications in photographs or facsimiles. This work was never undertaken by egyptology since the decipherment of hieroglyphs by Champollion in 1822. Once completed it will serve as a source for a new digital font meeting all the requierements of the research, no matter which period of the writing is taken into account. This font will ultimately be used for the editorial work on the dictionary.

(5 volumes, Leipzig, 1935Leipzig, -1959 C'est la somme absolue que l'on doit toujours consulter en premier. Même si l'information que ce travail contient reflète un état des connaissances lexicales antérieur à la Première guerre mondiale, son autorité n'a pas faibli, faute de mieux. Bien des dictionnaires ou lexiques qui lui sont postérieurs reprennent souvent, sans les réactualiser, les traductions qu'il propose. Les références (Belegstellen), publiées séparément sont, par rapport à la masse des textes actuellement connus, incomplètes à un degré variable selon les périodes ou les corpus textuels considérés. De plus, les ouvrages auxquels les Belegstellen renvoient sont dépassés ; ces références doivent donc être converties vers des publications plus récentes. Ainsi, à simple titre d'exemple :

This article presents a short overview of the project „Altägyptische Wörterbücher im Verbund“ hosted
at Leipzig University. Its aim is to establish a digital infrastructure for linking the lexical material of
selected dictionaries of Ancient Egyptian of the 19th and early 20th century to a modern standard
wordlist, the one of the Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae (TLA).