Tamil dictionary dispute

[Thomas Malten]

 Dear Dr Wujastyk,

 thank you for your early reply to my request for an explanation
 of the procedure regarding your postings of Mr Ramakrishnan's
 false allegations of copyright infringement of CreA publisher's
 `Dictionary of Contemporary Tamil'.

 I am quite satisfied with what you have said knowing myself
 quite well that you have no part in the dispute. As far as the
 article in the Indian Express is concerned I can only state
 that it does not report any facts but merely contains the
 opinions of Mr Ramakrishna and his lawyer. The reason for this
 being front page news may have more to do with the Indian
 Express' (GATT?) politics or Mr Ramakrishnans influence with
 the newspaper than with Tamil lexicography, for all I know.

 As the suit which the managing director of CreA publishers, Mr
 Ramakrishnan, has brought against the IITS is now under
 consideration by the judges of the Madras High Court, you will
 understand that I can make only a few personal remarks on the
 case. The IITS has denied Mr Ramakrishnan's allegations as
 unfounded and has filed a counter to his plaint. I think it is
 only proper to wait for a decision of the court before entering
 into a more detailed discussion. I may, however, say a little
 on Tamil lexicographic work done in Germany.

 The Institute of Indology at Cologne University (an
 organisation without commercial interests) then under
 the directorship of Professor K.L. Janert - whose death was
 announced to the members of this list by Professor Lariviere
 recently - has been working on a modern Tamil-English
 Dictionary since 1975. The effort concentrated especially on
 the difficult matter of the lexical semantics of the modern
 Tamil verb as well as idioms and idiomatic expressions in
 Modern Tamil. In the course of the work a voluminous manuscript
 of above tenthousand pages containing headwords and many
 illustrating example sentences was compiled. For many years
 this project was financed by the German research foundation
 (DFG) and Dr P.R. Subramanian (the chief editor of "CreA's
 Dictionary of Contemporary Tamil") spent about ten years at
 Cologne University, mainly working on the modern Tamil-English
 Dictionary project.

 I myself have spent the years 1975-80 at Annamalai University
 studying Tamil and collecting materials for a Tamil dictionary.
 Several yards of manuscript stuff, like word indexes to the
 works of modern Tamil authors, meant to enable an
 identification of `contemporary' Tamil words and their
 meanings, can be referred to at the IITS, Cologne. This basic
 lexicographical and corpus work was continued throughout most
 of the eighties and is still continuing. The aim of the work is
 to produce a comprehensive multilingual Tamil dictionary that
 is strictly based on corpora and at the same time allows
 continual expansion. Each entry in our Online Tamil Lexicon
 (OTL) - which does not contain any materials of which Mr
 Ramakrishnan owns the copyright - is to contain full source
 references consisting of the literary source as well as an
 example quotation from it together with the English meaning in
 the near future. The omission so far of such sources in the OTL
 may have led to the impression that they do not exist. We shall
 provide also a file "sources.otl" which will contain all
 references to the source materials. INDOLOGY will be informed
 of the changes.

 I may draw your attention and that of those interested in
 Indian lexicography to a very instructive article of Ladislav
 Zgusta, _Copying in Lexicography: Monier-Williams' Sanskrit
 Dictionary and Other Cases (Dvaiko\'syam)_ In: Lexicographica
 4, 1988, p. 145-164.

 I hope this will do for a start.
-Thomas Malten
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Institute of Indology and Tamil Studies, Pohligstr.1, 50969 Koeln, Germany
Tel 0221/4705340 Fax 0221/4705151 email ami01 at rrz.uni-koeln.de
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