Dirêjî Kurdî : a lexicographic environment for Kurdish language using 4th Dimension®

Résumé En

The Kurdish language presents specific problems for the lexicographer. Being the language of a people without a state, it has attracted less interest than the other languages of the Middle East, and it is only recently that lexicographic studies and bilingual dictionaries of Kurdish have been published. It lacks standardisation (division in dialects, and above all, use of three different writing systems). It also presents further problems in the field of computing (encoding). Paradoxally, this complicated situation means the computer may be especially useful for lexicographic work on the Kurdish language. This paper deals with Dirêjî Kurdî, a project for the development of a lexicographic software environment specifically geared towards Kurdish : the different phases of the project, the reasons for the technical choices made by the author, its current state of development, the problems encountered and the planned extensions (linking with CD-ROM dictionaries, corpora, compliance with TEI-SGML) are introduced.