I’ll tell you something the world needs:
A programmer-y person with a linguistic bent, or a language-y person with a computer-y bent, or someone else who might in some ways resemble me but with more free time (or the greater technical skill to diminish the requisite quantity of time), who will take a look at this, scour the web for digital copies of old dictionaries and lexica that are in the public domain, and start cranking out new modules for Apple’s Dictionary.app.
Look, there is no reason why I should not already be able to open Dictionary on my Mac and be able to search at least the Liddell & Scott Greek Lexicon, the Gesenius Hebrew Lexicon, the Lewis & Short Latin Dictionary, and the Monier-Williams Sanskrit Dictionary. In respective unicode fonts, of course. (I mean, obviously: transliteration is for philistines.)
Why can’t I do this yet? We’re not talking flying cars, here; so how about it, Internet? I mean, is this the future or isn’t it? My thumbs are getting tired from all this page flipping.
In the meantime, I took a StarDict version of the Monier-Williams, and ran it through DictUnifier, and came up with this (it’s a doozy at about 40mb — don’t download it frivolously). Unzip it, and put the resultant folder in Macintosh HD >> Users >> YourUserName >> Library >> Dictionaries . If the “Dictionaries” folder doesn’t exist, create it (and make sure to spell it right).
After that, if you open Dictionary.app you should find that you have the Monier-Williams as one of your dictionaries, though it’s not as pretty as it should be (the digitization was apparently made with an old console dictionary application in mind), and it uses the Harvard-Kyoto transliteration scheme (blech).
Anybody know where I can find any sort of unicode Devanagari version? I know I can search online lexica, but it would be nice to have such quick access when offline.
Great! Thanks for posting this!
Hey, great tip! Thanks so much! Is there any way I can get an English-Sanskrit dictionary too?
You should be able to follow the same procedure with any dictionary you can find in (or put into) StarDict format.
Wow, that’s great! Thank you! If you don’t know, now there is also a dedicated MW Sanskrit-English dictionary application for mac. However, System 10.5.8, and 64 bit is required. Here’s a link to download:
http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/41087/monier-williams
hey rpollack, you’re a funny guy! I use mac OSX (10.7.3) can i use your MW Sanskrit dictionary somehow? I am an absolute hopeless case re computers, I’ve looked for the “macintosh HD” thing, to no avail. How old is this thread?
thanks for any further advice,
kind regards,
Shakshi
Shakshi,
It should work. “Macintosh HD” is usually an icon on your desktop. If not, you can also get to the same place by clicking on the desktop (to bring the Finder menu to the top of your screen) and then pressing shift-command-G. (Or click “Go” on the drop-down menu and selecting “Go to Folder”.)
Then enter:
~/Library/
And click Go. Then you can follow the directions above about finding or creating the Dictionaries folder and putting the file in there.
This is fantastic. Thank you. Sure would like to know if anyone gets this in Devanagari Script. Or with even a more useful Sanskrit Dictionary like Apte. But so fare so good. I really like this and am happy (obviously) that I found it.
Any other dictionaries available?
How can I stay posted if you update this?
I’m not aware of any other dictionaries being available (unless you want to search them out and follow the same process outlined here to convert them). And I’m not expecting to update this, since it’s been sufficient for my purposes. I’d be happy to hear about other options if should discover them, though.