Newari Lexicon

Please note that this site is still under construction. We appreciate your patience.

If you have entered this site at http://newari.net you may need to access it at this URL to use the Search facility: http://panactive.com/newarilexicon

The Newari Lexicon is compiled from a group of Nepalese manuscripts of a single text, the Amarakosa (click here to see a description of the sources). The manuscripts date from the end of the fourteenth to the early nineteenth centruries. Each manuscript contains the text of the Amarakosa, a popular Sanskrit thesaurus written in verse, with notes in Newari containing brief Newari glosses of each group of Sanskrit synonyms. The Newari Lexicon is a compilation of words from the Newari glosses, with reference to the original Sanskrit and to English glosses.

Classical Sanskrit (CS) font. If you have a browser that permits change of font face (Netscape 3.05 or higher, or Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.01 or higher), and you have a font for viewing the transliterated Devanagari characters according to the Classical Sanskrit (CS) coding conventions, then you should select options that allow you to view according to the CS conventions. This route provides optimal viewing pleasure.
When in Classical Sanskrit mode, the Lexicon looks for a font named "SANSKRIT TIMES NEWROMAN GE" to contain transliterated Devanagari characters. (If it can't find this font, it simply uses the browser's default. Aside from a certain decline in intelligibility, no harm done.)
 
A font with this name has been created by Jamie Hubbard and George Eager, and the authors have kindly made it available as a public service. To download for the Mac platform, ftp://ftp2.pair.com/pub/webart/ttskrit2_sit.hqx; and for the PC Platform, ftp://ftp2.pair.com/pub/webart/ttskrit2.exe. Install the fonts using your system's standard procedure.
You will then have Sanskrit enabled Times New Roman and Arial fonts in standard, bold, italic, and bold italic. These fonts may also be used in your word processor. The download files also contain technical documentation of the fonts and CS coding conventions.
 
Browser's default font. If you do not have the browser version and/or fonts for using the Classical Sanskrit fonts, then you can use the browser's standard default font, which is whatever font you have chosen as the default for your browser, or whatever pre-installed default came with the browser (usually Times New Roman). In utilizing search commands, you must use the Lexicon project entry conventions (click for an explanation) to represent Devanagari diacritics. For another table showing the Lexicon Project diacritics system, please click here.

The Newari Lexicon is a project of the Nepal Bhasha Dictionary Committee (NBDC), founded by the late Prem Bahadur Kansakar and chaired by Dr. Kamal Prakash Malla. The Lexicon was compiled by Kashinath Tamot and the Nepal Bhasha Dictionary Committee compilation team,   including notably Gurushekhar Rajopadhyaya, Omi Sharma, and Saraswati Tuladhar, with support from the Toyota Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. It is being edited by Kashinath Tamot and Ian Alsop and the Lexicon Project Team; the editing of English glosses is still in the preliminary stage and we hope to enlist the help of many Newar and foreign scholars in this effort once this site goes live. Other participants in the compilation and editing have been instrumental to this effort and will be described in our upcoming section on the Nepal Bhasha Dictionary Project  as a whole and the Lexicon Project Team. Database design and production, and Internet production, has been by Mimi Church. The Newari Lexicon is published by Asianart.com.  Please note this site is still Under Construction.