Completeness of the Dictionary

A new volume on South Asian Buddhist manuscripts (From Birch Bark to Digital Data: Recent Advances in Buddhist Manuscript Research) has just been published by the Austrian Academy of Sciences. It brings together papers from the 2009 conference ‘Indic Buddhist Manuscripts: The State of the Field’ at Stanford University and provides the most comprehensive and detailed overview of the topic available. In spite of its title (adapted from my 2012 paper “From Birch Bark to Digital Editions”), the volume does not address the digital representation of manuscripts, but our Catalog of Gāndhārī Texts and Dictionary of Gāndhārī are mentioned in the survey of Gāndhārī manuscript studies by Richard Salomon (pp. 1, 14–15). We are given more credit for completeness than currently due: The cited number of 125,000 (now 138,560) “entries” refers to individual word tokens in the source corpus for our Dictionary. The number of proper Dictionary articles (most of them recently written) is currently 1,941, though happily growing at a steady pace. We anticipate that we will complete lexicographic coverage of published Gāndhārī manuscripts by the end of this year.