Hi folks! My name’s Shashank, and I’m a doctoral student at the University of Toronto, where I study religion in Kannada, Tamil, and Sanskrit. In my spare time, I work on various projects to build learning materials in Kannada, ranging from the grammar of Modern Kannada to a literary dictionary for reading Classical Kannada. I’m not a tech person by any stretch, so I thought I’d at least introduce myself to folks here.
I know there’s some existing efforts to digitize several dictionaries, but I thought I’d point out two Kannada-English dictionaries that might be worth working with. DSAL (Digital South Asia Library) has a digitized version of Ferdinand Kittel’s Kannada-English dictionary, which continues to be the mainstay of Kannada studies in Western academia (and to some extent also in Karnataka). There is also the Rajapurohit-Učida Kannada-English etymological dictionary (KEED), which is very useful for historical linguistics (though slightly less so for my work).
I’m generally interested in developing and/or preserving digital for learning Modern and Classical Kannada, since most of these are only available in print and from Kannada publishers (and hence not widely available in the diaspora, where I am located). I’m happy to offer assistance in terms of locating and reading through older texts and materials.