The Glossarium Graeco-Arabicum
 
The Greek and Arabic Lexicon was launched by Gerhard Endress in view of opening up the lexicon of the Medieval Arabic translations from the Greek. It has been partly published as an analytical reference dictionary (Endress-Gutas 2001). The images of the filecards (approx. 80.000) which have not yet been published, comprising Arabic roots from the letter jîm to the end of the Arabic alphabet, are being made available in the database Glossarium Graeco-Arabicum. Both the printed and the electronic versions make available the direct information which the Graeco-Arabic translations contain for several areas of research. These include:

• the vocabulary and syntax of Classical and Middle Arabic; 
• the development of a scientific and technical vocabulary in Arabic; 
• the vocabulary of Classical and Middle Greek; 
• the chronology and nature of the translation movement into Arabic; and 
• the establishment of the texts of Greek works and their Arabic translations. 

 Since 1980, the materials available in earlier glossaries, included in editions of the texts both published and unpublished, were compiled in a systematic layout on index cards, and were considerably enlarged in the course of the continuing work on the project from the original source texts, available in manuscript and in critical editions. On this basis, a group organized by G. Endress started to prepare the Greek and Arabic Lexicon, being the first attempt to present in a rationalized and systematic way the lexical results of Graeco-Arabic studies during the past hundred years, and a workbook containing methods and materials toward the compilation of a comprehensive Graeco-Arabic thesaurus in the future. In this workgroup, scholars competent in both Greek and Arabic collaborated to compile materials from printed glossaries, to parse Greek texts and their Arabic translations from printed editions and manuscript sources, to enter the references in card files, to verify these against the sources, to add the context in both languages, and finally, to elaborate the final dictionary articles for publication in the Greek and Arabic Lexicon. Supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft between 1992 and 2006, this basic work has been made partly available in print (vol. I of the Lexicon). The ERC project Ideas, Advanced Grant 249431 will continue this research in the form of an analytical reference dictionary. Simultaneously, the online database Glossarium Graeco-Arabicum will be developed. 
 
 
The G2A Web Application
 
Frontier research in the field of computational linguistics will be put in the service of the studies of the philosophical and scientific works translated from Greek into Arabic. An unprecedented tool for parsing Graeco-Arabic texts, Pinakes Texts Greek & Arabic is the expected outcome of the ERC project Ideas, Advanced Grant 249431.
 
The Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale, CNR, Area della Ricerca di Pisa directed by Andrea Bozzi, is one of the leading scientific institutions in the field of text processing system development, computer assisted textual criticism and computerized linguistic corpora analysis. The ERC project Ideas, Advanced Grant 249431, implying as it does a multilingual terminology extraction, will benefit from the skills and tools housed in this institution. The ILC-CNR will contribute the following to the project:
  – the fully fledged development of lexica already available into a new search engine which will be balanced and optimized for the specific needs of the project, especially for the production of Greek-Arabic contrastive concordances;
  – the production of a pattern for parsing Graeco-Arabic texts,
  – with special emphasis on the lemmatization of the Arabic texts, in order to allow the user to sort terms with various criteria (e.g., all the Arabic renderings of a Greek term, as different as they may be in the Arabic version).
The final step will be represented by the production of a domain lexicon semantically described in an electronic thesaurus. To this end, the ILC-CNR is currently engaged in the development of a new methodology to be put in the service of all the future critical editions of Greek-Arabic translations of philosophical and scientific works.