public domain Russian/English dictionary

[bob@GNU.AI.MIT.EDU]

Dover has printed a public domain Russian-English English-Russian
dictionary of phrases and sentences.  This could be very useful for
Lojban, since it could be converted into a Russian/English/Lojban
dictionary.

This is not a dictionary in the usual sense, with simple definitions.
In addition to the most common translations of words from one language
to another, such as "rooka" for "hand" or "dovodeet" for "to take to",
it has more than 30,000 phrases and sentences that illustrate the
various meanings of the 5,000 or so words it carries from each
language.

Here are extracts from the entry for "hand":

  The first entries are for "rooka", the word for hand or arm:

      Where can I wash my hands?
      I shook hands with him and left.
      The business has changed hands

  Each English sentence has a Russian translation, in Cyrillic, with
  accent marks.  (I won't try to illustrate them here; my aphabetic
  transliterations look terrible.)

  Then comes a subentry for another English meaning of hand, `give' or
  "dat'", as in:

      Will you hand me the pencil?

  Then the subentry for "farm hand"  "rabochee na fyerme"

      I worked a couple of years as a farm hand.

  Then "oochasteeye":

      Did you have a hand in this project?

  In addition the entry contains sentences illustrating, among others:

      hand made:  This rug is hand made.

      hour hand:  The hour hand is broken.

      to hand down: The recipe has been handed down in our family for
      generations.

  Also, sentences for `to hand in', `to lend a hand' and more.

The entry for "to have" includes sentences illustrating how to say "to
have a baby", "to have a drink", and "to have to".

Inspired Lojbanists could take several entries each and write Lojban
sentences to match the English and Russian.  This not only would
create a dictionary between Lojban and two natural languages for the
effort of writing just one, but would provide an excellent corpus of
Lojban sentences.  And provide lots of practice writing Lojban to
express natural language sentences.

Sad to say, I don't have time to do anything with Lojban at the moment
(I'm spending what time I have learning Russian, but am far behind
Lojbab).

Does anyone have access to a optical character recognition scanner
that could put this dictionary on line?  The book is printed clearly,
with few fonts, so a good Latin alphabet/Cyrillic alphabet scanner
should not have much trouble with it.  An online version would be much
easier to work with.

I am not suggesting that work on this replace the current dictionary
project.  Instead, I see this as a posible complement or further
enhancement of the current dictionary---and something that might be
interesting for a large group to work on in small pieces, if someone
were to act as a central coordinator.

You don't need to understand or read Russian to use this as a source
for English to Lojban writing.  But if you were to write a sentence in
Lojban that accurately translates "Where can I wash my hands?", you
would have written the Lojban translation for the similar Russian
sentence.

I find that it is fun to read this dictionary in small doses---not
something I ever thought I would say about a dictionary!

The dictionary is an unabridge republication of the War Department
Technical manual TM30-944, "Dictionary of Spoken Russian", and appears
to have come out of WWII.

Dover titles the dictionary:

    A phrase and sentence dictiony of spoken Russian,
    Russian-English English-Russian

No author listed on title page or the back of the title page.
No copyright.
573 pages
$10.95 paperback

ISBN: 0-486-20496-0
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 58-59928

Best wishes!

    Robert J. Chassell               bob@gnu.ai.mit.edu
    Rattlesnake Mountain Road        (413) 298-4725 or (617) 253-8568 or
    Stockbridge, MA 01262-0693 USA   (617) 876-3296 (for messages)