Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru Annual Report 2008-9

The Dictionary staff have enjoyed a busy and productive year. Since all the members of staff are relatively new to their current posts, they have all continued to improve upon their knowledge and to practise their newly-acquired skills in the preparation of Parts 9, 10 and 11 of the Second Edition.

A successful one-day conference entitled ‘Words, Texts, and Dictionaries’ was held in October 2008. We were fortunate that Professor Kevin Scannell was able to stay in Aberystwyth for a few days after the conference to work on the corpus and to discuss future developments. We are extremely grateful to him for being so willing to share his time and expertise with us. We are also grateful to the staff and officers of the National Library and to Dr Angharad Elias and Mrs Nia Davies from the Centre for assisting with the arrangements. We have received several requests to arrange similar conferences on a regular basis. It was decided, however, not to organize a one-day conference in 2009, but to hold a public meeting following the Edward Lhuyd Conference in order to consult our users regarding our plans for the future (see below).

The Dictionary continues to support the Welsh Language Board’s work on the standardization of place-names and technical terms by attending many of the Board’s committee meetings. We are very grateful to both Mr Gareth A. Bevan and Mr Patrick Donovan for agreeing to represent the Dictionary in these two areas. They, together with Mr Andrew Hawke, have also continued to attend the Board’s six-monthly meetings concerning lexicographical developments.

One of the prospective projects of Canolfan Bedwyr (Bangor University) is to prepare an extensive traditional corpus (around 100 million words) of modern Welsh, tagged grammatically. A corpus of this kind would obviously be an extremely valuable resource for the Dictionary, and we support Canolfan Bedwyr’s grant application to create the corpus.

The Dictionary is very fortunate in its many benefactors, who are far too numerous to name here individually. We are particularly grateful to the Consulting Editor, Professor R. Geraint Gruffydd, and to our dedicated proofreaders for their valuable observations and their hard work during the past year.
Mrs Glenys Howells assisted us diligently again this year in the detailed task of verifying quotations. Professor Kevin Scannell and the staff of Canolfan Bedwyr are always willing to share their technical skills with us, and we also have numerous specialists in various subject areas who are prepared to reply to our queries: we are grateful to them all.

We are also indebted to our neighbours in the National Library of Wales for providing resources that are necessary for us to carry out our work successfully and for their continued and generous assistance. It is a pleasure to acknowledge the co-operation and professionalism of our colleagues here at the Centre and that of the staff of both the University of Wales Press and the Registry in Cardiff.

Lastly, we wish to thank the numerous people who assist us by contributing additional material to the Dictionary, on paper and electronically, and for responding to our continual enquiries. We thank them all, and particularly Dr Bruce Griffiths, for their regular contributions.
We took advantage of the fact that many experts in the field of Celtic Studies were in Aberystwyth for the Edward Lhuyd Conference by arranging a public meeting to seek their opinion on the future of the Dictionary upon completion of the re-editing of A–B.
On 4 July a wide cross-section of the academic world and various public bodies such as the National Assembly for Wales and the Welsh Language Board attended the meeting. Mr Andrew Hawke presented numerous ideas and suggestions, which were well received by the audience. A summary of these appears on the Dictionary’s website .
We were greatly encouraged by the audience’s appreciation of our work and their support for the proposals put forward, including publishing the entire Dictionary online rather than in print.

Part 9 of the Dictionary (atchwelaf–bar1) was published in September 2009, and we aim to publish Part 10 in 2010. Part 10 (and some eight pages of Part 11) have already been drafted, and three quarters of Part 10 has been subedited. In view of the considerable number of new words in this part of the alphabet, we foresee that it will take another four parts – possibly even five – (Parts 10–13/14) to complete A–B.
Evidently more time will be needed to complete the work than was originally estimated. A substantial sum of money was allocated to the Dictionary by the University of Wales Council in July 2009 in order to develop our future plans. It was decided to engage the services of Lexical Computing Ltd. to assist the staff in selecting a new dictionary writing system and also to advise us as we create a corpus of all kinds of texts to be used as we re-edit the Dictionary and implement a corpus query system.
The remainder of the money will be used to operate pilot schemes in order to estimate the length and breadth of the task of adding new vocabulary across the alphabet and editing a shorter single-volume historical dictionary similar to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. Lexical Computing Ltd. will also help us to prepare a comprehensive and robust business plan for the next decade.

An exciting future awaits both the staff and users of the Dictionary.