akkdict 0.1.0

simple utility for looking up Akkadian words in the CAD

akkdict is a simple command-line python program that takes an akkadian word as input and opens pdfs of several akkadian dictionaries to the right page (or somewhere thereabouts). It works well for some of the illicit pdfs of The Concise Dictionary of Akkdian (CDA) and Das Akkadishes Handwörterbuch (AHw) floating around, if you happen to have them. It also will get you within 100 pages in the Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago (CAD), which can be freely downloaded from http://oi.uchicago.edu/research/publications/assyrian-dictionary-oriental-institute-university-chicago-cad (naturally, akkdict also has a helper script for this; see below). If you would like to contribute to expanding and improving the CAD index or any of the other indicies, we would be happy to pull from you! If you are a humanities major and using git is too hard, contact me!

Installation

Install akkdict from PyPI with pip3! pip install akkdict If you don’t have pip and are unmotivated to get it on your platform, you can download clone the source from github, enter the project directory and run python3 setup.py install, which will probably require root, and you should just not do it. Just git pip.

One thing to know is you must have a way to open a PDF to a specific page number from the command line. This is no problem on Linux. Just look at the man page for your favorite PDF reader. I hear talk that this is possible on OS X with AppleScript. There are also command line options for this in Acrobat Reader. I frankly don’t even know if this package works at all on Windows, but I have my doubts. If someone who knows something about Windows wants to contribute, please do!

akkdict requires some configuration. It will let you know about it. The default config file has comments which explain things.

Usage

Open a word in the configured dictionaries: akkdict šarru

Print the page number (and volume): akkdict -p šarru

Download the CAD into a local folder: akkdict --download-cad