Andamanese Dictionary

On the brink of extinction, the Great Andamanese language, one of the oldest in the world, had been crying out for concerted effort for salvage and documentation. This multilingual interactive dictionary is a maiden effort to capture the last remnant data. The dictionary comes with a meticulously designed CD-ROM of the entire dictionary backed by original sound recordings of Great Andamanese speakers.

The development of the Great Andamanese linguistic structures followed a completely different trajectory from the languages of agrarian and pastoral societies. Among a people whose distinct life pattern influenced the emergence and development of grammatical structures and vocabulary, the documented entities in this dictionary give an invaluable insight into the ancient cognitive world of the Great Andamanese people. The conceptual structures embedded in lexical items emerge as reflections of the collective mental representation of ideas and objects by the members of the speech community.

The grammatical structures, unique in their own right, force u to rethink about the universals of language. This dictionary documents the present form of the language, a koine, drawing its resources from four great Andamanese languages, two of which, Khora and Bo have recently become extinct. This makes it an invaluable, first and last document of these extinct languages for not only the linguist and anthropologist, but also the ethnobiologist, natural scientist, botanist, zoologist, ornithologist and anyone who can make use of the scientific and Latin names for natural phenomena painstakingly researched and included.