Marius Sala, Ion Dãnãilã * Lexicography at the "Iorgu Iordan" Institute of Linguistics

A new explanatory dictionary, Noul dicþionar explicativ al limbii române (NDEX) is being compiled at our institute. It registers nearly 100,000 words and variants, exceeding DEX by more than 30,000. In this way. MDA will have over 175,000 entries of which 125,000 are headwords and some 50,000 are lexical variants. Assuming that each word of the academic dictionary (DA plus DLR) has, in average, five meanings, the total number of meanings for the 125,000 headwords would sum up approximately 625,000 meanings - which allows us to consider it a "depository dictionary" of the Romanian language.

The preoccupation within the Romanian Academy for the dictionary of the Romanian language extended over several decades. DLR has been a perennial task and the main reason for the existence of the institutes entrusted with its fulfillment. The studying of the Romanian lexicon will not come to an end with the publication of the last installment of DLR: new words will continue to be coined, new meanings to be added, new terms to be borrowed from other languages. The spreading of a word may change, too, in relation to time and space. Accepted etymologies are subject to reconsideration and corrections. Considering this, and taking into account the fact that the file of the academic dictionary is incomplete, a project known as Inventarul lexical al limbii române (ILEX) has been considered at "Iorgu Iordan" Institute of Linguistics in Bucharest, aiming to set up a computerized database of the Romanian word inventory of all times. In this way, we will have "a storage" of all Romanian words, including various terminological fields, of use to further lexicographical works and to other language studies. On the other hand, it is desirable to compile and publish supplements to the existent volumes of the academic dictionary in order to update language evidence. Therefore research on the vocabulary will go on as long as the Romanian language exists.

2. The Contrastive Dictionary of Synonyms, Analogies and Associations

It all started in 1976 - that is before the penetration here of PC's and their specific software - namely when professor Ion Coteanu, then director of the Bucharest Institute of Linguistics, prompted the department of lexicology and lexicography to produce a dictionary of semantic analogies. The task was challenging not only because there was no comprehensive dictionary of semantic analogies and associations for Romanian at the time (and neither is it ready to this day), but also because though, theoretically, the two linguistic concepts were accepted to be different (yet related), practically, the separation line between semantic analogy and semantic association was not easy to be drawn - perhaps due to the very fact that the concepts are akin.

It was this difficulty of a practical nature that stirred us up (me and my late colleague Radu Michãescu), to conceive, in 1976, a theoretic model apt to rule out the ambiguity between analogy and association both on the level of contents (into synonymy and antonymy) and on that of expression (into homonymy and paronymy, respectively). The suggested model was published the next year [l]. In 1978, we sketched out in a preprint the theoretical and methodological principles for the elaboration of a dictionary of synonyms, analogies and associations of the Romanian language [2] and a specimen [3], and submitted them for consideration to the Scientific board of our institute. At that stage, the conclusion was that such a project would stretch over a very long period (some 40 years) if carried out "traditionally", but might be achieved sooner if computerized.

So we were asked whether the methodology devised for the "analogical" dictionary is amenable to formalization and may be fed into a computer. Consequently, we had a short, but fruitful, collaboration with Radu Nicolescu and Lucreþia Vasilescu of the Computing Center of the Bucharest University. The answer was positive and it resulted in a sui generis software put forward by the two computer engineers, allowing the old second generation IBM of the above mentioned center to sort and list the analogies to and associations with the word blitz in Romanian, in order of semantic nearness to the word referred to.

Thereafter, in 1979, the two linguists brought to the attention of the Scientific board of the Bucharest Institute of Linguistics a new research subject, i. e. The Phono-Morpho-Semantic Data Bank of the Romanian Language (PMSDB) [4] that was to be achieved by means of the computer.

The Contrastive Dictionary of Synonyms, Analogies and Associations (CDSAA) would be part of the semantic section of this data bank¹. Both research projects were approved and have been included as of that moment in the yearly programs and long term plans of our institute.

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