Largest somali dictionary ever

[Midas]

I've been looking into somali dictionaries recently. The largest one is apparently a somali -English dictionary by ahmed mire. With a 150,000 entries which is 1200 pages long
This was a bit confusing to me becuase if you look up the largest premodedn arabic dictionary. It's

[COLOR=var(--color-progressive--active,#233566)]Taj al-Arus Min Jawahir al-Qamushttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taj_al-Arus_Min_Jawahir_al-Qamus[/COLOR]​

Which has over 120,000 definitions/entries
And when you look up the dictionary on the safina safwa website. This book is 10 volumes long and 7,600 pages.

My question is why is the somali dictionary only 1200 pages long? Is there something off

 

[Thegoodshepherd]

The size of the Somali lexicon is actually considered surprisingly large for a language which had no serious orthography until the 20th century. It is a very capacious language.

 

[Emir of Zayla]

I've been looking into somali dictionaries recently. The largest one is apparently a somali -English dictionary by ahmed mire. With a 150,000 entries which is 1200 pages long
This was a bit confusing to me becuase if you look up the largest premodedn arabic dictionary. It's

[COLOR=var(--color-progressive--active,#233566)]Taj al-Arus Min Jawahir al-Qamushttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taj_al-Arus_Min_Jawahir_al-Qamus[/COLOR]​

Which has over 120,000 definitions/entries
And when you look up the dictionary on the safina safwa website. This book is 10 volumes long and 7,600 pages. View attachment 351583


My question is why is the somali dictionary only 1200 pages long? Is there something off

Your first mistake was comparing it to Arabic. Arabic has over 12 million distinct words compared to English which has 170,000. In comparison, Somali with 150,000 is actually pretty impressive for a language that wasn’t as documented/written compared to the ones previous mentioned.

 

[Midas]

Your first mistake was comparing it to Arabic. Arabic has over 12 million distinct words compared to English which has 170,000. In comparison, Somali with 150,000 is actually pretty impressive for a language that wasn’t as documented/written compared to the ones previous mentioned.

No mh questions Is more that something seems off with the somali dictionary size . How could you fit 150,000 entries in 1200 pages? The official most recent somali qaamus ftom 2013 is about 70k entries.

 

[Midas]

But to your guys point. About somali dictionaries being of a pretty decent size. I 100% agree. I've actually looked into it and somali is the language in africa with the most dictionaries and most advanced lexicography. It's much more advanced than what you get in either amhara or swahili. The textual lingustucs corpus of swahili and amahric is around 25 million words . Where's as the somali one is about 70 million words.


For those of you who don't know what a textual lingustics corpus is. It's basically a collcetion of all sorts of texts gathered in a database for lingustics resaerch purposes.