The Leiden IE department has been working on the project since 1991. At its first stage, Peter Schrijver devised the database structure and the system of language abbreviations, which have been electronically implemented by Andrea de Leeuw van Weenen.
The next step was to fill in "blank spaces" on the etymological map of IE languages. We have good recent etymological dictionaries of Sanskrit, Greek, Gothic at our disposal, but there were no etymological dictionaries of Tocharian, British, Old Frisian, etc., while the last compendia of Albanian or Modern Persian etymology were more than a century old. It was therefore decided to start with these less privileged languages.
Thanks to a grant of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), Jörundur Hilmarsson (Reykjavík) could spend his sabbatical in Leiden in 1991-1992 working on an etymological dictionary of Tocharian. In spite of his progressing illness, he managed to finish the letter K and a substantial part of words starting with a vowel, which altogether constitutes approximately a third of the whole. His much-regretted death on August 13, 1992, put an abrupt end to this endeavour. The unfinished manuscript has now been published (J. Hilmarsson, Materials for a Tocharian historical and etymological dictionary, edited by Alexander Lubotsky and Guðrún Þórhallsdóttir with the assistance of Sigurður H. Pálsson, Reykjavík: Málvísindastofnun Háskola Íslands, 1996).
In the period from the end of 1994 to 1997, Dirk Boutkan worked on an etymological dictionary of Old Frisian (more specifically, of the language of the Riustringer codices). This work, which was supported by a research grant of the NWO, is now completed. The Old Frisian database is now available on-line.
In 1995-6, Bardhyl Demiraj (Tirana) spent twelve months in Leiden (with financial support of the NWO and the Research School CNWS) compiling an etymological dictionary of Albanian (with an emphasis on the inherited vocabulary), which has since been published (Albanische Etymologien: Untersuchungen zum albanischen Erbwortschatz, Amsterdam - Atlanta, 1997). On the basis of his dictionary, Demiraj later prepared an etymological database, which can be consulted on-line.
Leonard Hertzenberg (St.-Petersburg) spent several months in Leiden in 1996 (again with financial support of the NWO) working on an etymological dictionary of Modern Persian.
During 1997, Caroline aan de Wiel and Alwin Kloekhorst (students of the Indo-European department) compiled an etymological database of Indo-Aryan on the basis of Mayrhofer’s Etymologisches Wörterbuch des Altindoarischen. This database is being currently revised and supplemented by Alexander Lubotsky. The completed portions of it can be consulted on-line.
In December 1997, we received a substantial grant from the NWO, which made it possible to intensify the work on the IED. At the moment, two post-docs (Cheung, Derksen) and two PhD-students (Driessen, Martirosian) are working full-time on the IED (cf. the list of contributors). "The Slavic inherited lexicon" (in progress) by R. Derksen can now be consulted on-line.
Sergei Starostin (Russian Academy of Sciences) was in Leiden in 1999-2000, working on the external connections of Proto-Indo-European (loanwords and cognates in other language families). At the same time, he has developed necessary software for presenting IE etymological databases on the Internet. His stay in Leiden was supported by the NWO.
In January 2000, the International Institute for Asian Studies (IAAS) has granted us permission to use its NT-server for presenting etymological databases on the Internet.
In august 2000, "A dictionary of Tocharian B" (by Douglas Q. Adams) and "Rgvedic word concordance" (by A. Lubotsky) were converted to databases and can now be consulted on-line.
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