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The Jan Deloof Breton-Dutch Dictionary

Jan Deloof has had an abiding interest in Breton language and culture over many years, which led him to compile an 800-page Breton-Dutch dictionary. In 2008 he kindly relicensed his dictionary under the GPL, so that it could be used in projects such as the Breton-French translator my colleague Fran Tyers helped Ofis ar Brezhoneg to develop). So far as I am aware, Mr Deloof's dictionary is the largest GPLed dictionary available for any Celtic language - it contains just over 40,000 entries. For Breton, try looking up levr or bro; for Dutch, try looking up boek or zijde.

Accessing the dictionary

This site provides a web interface (similar to the one used for my Eurfa Welsh-English dictionary) through which the entire contents of the dictionary can be queried. I have chosen to split the dictionary into two tables, one holding the basewords and another holding the citations (phrases). I am solely responsible for any errors arising from the conversion to web-format. The dictionary is also available for download as a PostgreSQL dump (2.0Mb) and in .csv format (1.2Mb), which can be imported into a spreadsheet. Note that these files WILL contain errors - both Mr Deloof and myself would be grateful for any comments or corrections.

Future work

A substantial amount of work remains to be done. Some discrepancies in the import need to be corrected (eg the occasional appearance of plurals in the definition segment, errant semicolons in the output). Other issues which will make the dictionary more accessible for software development will be addressed in the longer term (eg the presentation of plural forms as headwords, the splitting of the combined Dutch definitions into separate headwords). The interface needs to be upgraded to allow the page furniture and parts of speech to appear in four languages (Breton, Dutch, English and Welsh). Lastly, any additional material that emerges from Mr Deloof's current work on his Dutch-Breton dictionary needs to be integrated.