For Publishers and Institutional Partners

Wurdahuzdą: A Proto-Germanic Dictionary and Etymological Database is an independent scholarly project devoted to the reconstructed vocabulary of Proto-Germanic and its Indo-European origins. It combines a traditional historical-linguistic dictionary with a structured lexical database and a growing collection of digital research tools.

The project currently contains more than 5,300 reconstructed Proto-Germanic headwords and approximately 5,500 dictionary entries, representing more than 7,000 individual senses. Entries include definitions, grammatical information, reconstructed paradigms, etymologies, cognates, descendant forms, and bibliographic documentation.

The etymological component is being systematically researched and revised entry by entry. Particular attention is given to Proto-Indo-European reconstruction, Germanic historical phonology and morphology, competing scholarly analyses, and relevant research published after the major twentieth- and early twenty-first-century etymological dictionaries. The project's working research corpus currently includes 69 major scholarly sources comprising more than 32,000 pages, supplemented by journal articles, monographs, dissertations, and other specialist literature as individual entries require.

The project began with Proto-Germanic lexical data made available through Wiktionary, whose open collaborative work provided an invaluable starting point. Wurdahuzdą, however, is not intended simply as another presentation of that material. Its purpose is to subject the lexicon to systematic scholarly review, standardize its linguistic analysis and notation, expand its documentation, incorporate newer research, and make editorial decisions and uncertainties explicit.

A dictionary and a research database

Because the dictionary is built on a relational database rather than a collection of static pages, its data can also be explored computationally. The web application supports conventional dictionary searches as well as grammatical and morphological filtering, inflected-form analysis, morphological form finding, reverse English-to-Proto-Germanic lookup via senses, and reverse lookups of terms from around 200 modern and historical Germanic languages (as well as terms from another 200 historical and modern non-Germanic languages), descendant-language comparison, structured downloads, and statistical exploration of the lexicon.

The printed/electronic dictionary and the online research environment are different expressions of the same underlying scholarly resource. The database has also been designed with future reuse in mind, including applications in historical lexicography, digital humanities, linguistic teaching, corpus research, and computational work with reconstructed languages.

Why I am seeking partners

Wurdahuzdą is intended to remain broadly and openly accessible. My principal interest in working with a publisher or institutional partner is not commercial. I am seeking the scholarly legitimacy, editorial expertise, dissemination, long-term preservation, and visibility that an established academic publisher, university, library, learned society, or digital-humanities institution could provide.

A publishing partnership could take several forms. These might include a formally edited electronic edition; a multi-volume print or print-on-demand edition; integration of the dictionary with an established scholarly publishing platform; assignment of stable identifiers and archival preservation; or some combination of these while allowing the public web resource to remain freely available.

I would be particularly interested in arrangements that recognize the value of open scholarly infrastructure rather than requiring the research database to become a closed commercial product. The goal is to make the work as widely useful and durable as possible.

Institutional and funding partnerships

The project is currently independently financed. As its author is retired and able to devote substantial time to the work, it does not require the level of support normally associated with a full research staff. Even modest institutional or grant support, however, could make a meaningful difference.

Useful support could include the costs of web hosting, database and computing infrastructure, specialist publications and research materials, long-term digital preservation, technical development, accessibility work, editorial assistance, or preparation of publication-quality electronic and print editions.

Institutional collaboration could also help ensure the project's continuity beyond the working lifetime of its creator. For a resource intended to function as both a dictionary and a reusable linguistic dataset, stable stewardship and preservation are as important as publication itself.

About the editor

Scott Shay is a linguist and former computational linguist whose work spans Germanic historical linguistics, lexicography, information systems, and language technology. He studied Germanic linguistics and comparative and historical linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, and has published several books on linguistics and language history. His professional work in computational linguistics has included projects with Oracle, Grammarly, and Apple.

The structure of Wurdahuzdą reflects that combination of backgrounds: traditional comparative-historical philology on one side and structured linguistic data and computational tools on the other.

Current and planned outputs

The project is being developed simultaneously as an online dictionary, a structured scholarly database, and a publication-length reference work. Planned outputs include the complete Proto-Germanic dictionary; openly accessible web entries; searchable and downloadable lexical data; morphological and etymological research tools; and electronic and potentially multi-volume print editions suitable for libraries and individual scholars.

The dictionary is a long-term undertaking, but a substantial working resource already exists. I would be pleased to discuss partnerships at any stage: from informal scholarly collaboration or technical preservation to formal publication, institutional hosting, or funding support.

Publishers, libraries, universities, learned societies, digital-humanities centers, funding organizations, and individual scholars interested in discussing the project are warmly invited to contact me.

Scott Shay
sshay /at/ berkeley d0t edu