Challenges in Developing a Glagolitic Reverse Dictionary of Croatian Church Slavonic

Abstract The Glagolitic script is the oldest Slavic script and one of the two Slavic scripts (the other is Cyrillic). It was actively used in Croatia until the 19 th century. Today, the Glagolitic script is a symbol of Croatian national identity. It has significant cultural, artistic, and esthetic value. The goals of the Old Church Slavonic Institute are researching, discovering, recognizing, systematically listing, and editing Glagolitic manuscripts, inscriptions, and printed books. One of the Institute’s main tasks is to create a digital version of the Dictionary of the Croatian Redaction of Church Slavonic . This is a long-term project, and the dictionary has so far only been published in printed form (A to I). In addition to the creation of the digital dictionary, additional web content is being developed (e.g. games), which will provide an additional source and tool for dictionary compilers and users. One of these additional contents is the reverse dictionary, which consists of the headwords written in Glagolitic from the Dictionary. A reverse dictionary is a dictionary in which the words are sorted alphabetically by their final rather than initial letters, i.e. the words are sorted based on their endings. This allows users to look up words by focusing on their final segments. Reverse dictionaries are useful for scientific research, especially for the study of word-formation (e.g. the study of masculine-feminine pairs), but they can also be used for other purposes, such as finding rhymes and compiling educational games. A reverse dictionary for Croatian Church Slavonic is thus a useful tool for further research. The problem is not only that the word search is not done in a classic matter (where the string is searched from the beginning of the word) but also that the Glagolitic script has some specific letters which have to be mapped to certain characters in the Latin script and that the reverse dictionary has headwords in two scripts (Latin and Glagolitic). Currently, no available software solution can accommodate for these problems, so the reverse dictionary is being developed from scratch using a custom code. This paper presents the challenges and solutions in the development of the Croatian Church Slavonic Reverse Dictionary.