Some time (almost 10 years) ago, Don Blaheta arranged to have an
online version of the Novial Lexike put up on the Internet. It is
still there, at http://blahedo.org/novial/nl,
but there are some
problems with this:
(1) Don seems to have lost interest in Novial a long time ago, and at
any time he could decide to delete the files
(2) In any case, he does not respond to meil (either e- or snail-) and
so the listings (which have a few typographical errors) are not
correctable
(3) Because of changes in protocols, some of the information is not
properly legible (with some versions of Internet Explorer, for
example, the accented characters in French and German are garbled into
Cyrillic and other characters
There are some other, much more minor problems, which I also would
like to address, but I will go into them later. I have decided to make
a copy of the online Novial Lexike and make it available, using Google
Do***ents. I have already begun this and the letter A is pretty much
available already; the rest will soon follow. There are a couple of
difficulties that I'm not able to address completely, so I will simply
mention them:
(1) Unfortunately, Google Docs assigns an odd, automatically-generated
URL to each page. I've created a navigation page at
http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dd49qqzd_30r7fqsr
that you should
bookmark if you want to use this, and from this page you can link to
all the others; this is not an ideal solution, but it will have to do.
(2) Google Docs introduces its own style of HTML, which overrides
anything I put in, even though I am able to edit at an HTML level. As
a result, I have to tweak things and not just copy files. This will
make it take a while before the entire NL is available, but will be a
one-time problem. All the pages are copied already; they will simply
have to be cleaned up one at a time.
I intend to do some cleaning up (boldfacing the Novial entries and
things like that, correcting obvious typos, and such) but not changing
any of the content in any significant way. When this is done, I will
create two additional dictionaries; these will address the "other,
much more minor problems" I alluded to earlier:
(1) An expanded version: Jespersen used a highly abbreviated format to
save space. When an English (or French) word is very close to the
Novial, he did not write it in, assuming anyone can figure it out. The
Expanded NL will have those words in English explicitly entered. I
will not put in the French or German, not because I don't think them
in****tant, but because my fluency in those languages is not great
enough for me to be confident I can write the words correctly. In
addition, when a word is a derivative, it will be listed completely,
not just by giving the suffix as in the original NL. The expanded
version will also have some words added which Jespersen could not have
put in in 1930 (things like "televisione" which are obviously easy to
construct, but which refer to things that didn't exist in 1930!) or
didn't think to put in (like some of the chemical elements; he put in
some, but not all).
(2) An inverted version, which will be in English alphabetical order,
for ease in using when an Englist-to-Novial dictionary is more
convenient than a Novial-to-English one.
These will be generated slowly, as I have other demands on my time; I
will put out the cleaned-up NL as quickly as I can, but I can't
predict the pace of the generation of the other two dictionaries.
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