Lehnwortportal Deutsch: a new architecture for resources on lexical borrowings

This paper presents the Lehnwortportal Deutsch, a new, freely accessible publication platform for resources on German lexical borrowings in other languages, to be launched in the second half of 2022. The system will host digital-native sources as well as existing, digitized paper dictionaries on loanwords, initially for some 15 recipient languages. All resources remain accessible as individual standalone dictionaries; in addition, data on words (etyma, loanwords etc.) together with their senses and relations to each other is represented as a cross-resource network in a graph database, with careful distinction between information present in the original sources and the curated portal network data resulting from matching and merging information on, e. g., lexical units appearing in multiple dictionaries. Special tooling is available for manually creating graphs from dictionary entries during digitization and for editing and augmenting the graph database. The user interface allows users to browse individual dictionaries, navigate through the underlying graph and ‘click together’ complex queries on borrowing constellations in the graph in an intuitive way. The web application will be available as open source