Report on EURALEX LUA 1998: Ruth Laila Schmidt, Oslo, Norway:
A comparative glossary of Shina
Shina is an Indo-Aryan speech spoken in the mountainous regions of the upper Indus River and its tributaries. The Award supported research on a comparativ glossary of this language. The project was completed in August 2000, after research has been underway for more than 10 years.
Until 1999, the total numer of entries in the glossary was expanded to 1296, which is an increase of 39% even after deleting many unattested words and loanwords. The entries themselves had been expanded by the inclusion of grammatical data and examples of usage. During the first phase of the project, comparative data for Gilgiti was added to the existing data for the Kohistani and Guresi dialects. The entries are more comprehensive, have been thoroughly checked, and the glossary has begun to be a useful tool for research.
What now can be called a lexicon exists in a textbase format and needs to be converted to a format that can be used for publication. That is the next task, to be taken up during the fall semester 2001. Work on the lexicon is scheduled to Ms. Schmidt's sabbatical in fall 2001, and she hopes that by January 2002 she will have finished a formatted manuscript suitable for showing to publishers. In the meanwhile, Ms. Schmidt will have finished an article based on grammatical data collected during this research: Compound tenses in the Shina of Indus Kohistan. Forthcoming in Festschrift for Helmut Nespital (University of Berlin).
Ruth Laila Schmidt
Dept. of East European & Oriental Studies
University of Oslo,
P.O. Box 1030 Blindern
N-0315 OSLO, Norway

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