adab-tech/murya-hausa-en-lexicon-robinson1914

Robinson Hausa–English Lexicon (1914)

20,628 English→Hausa word/phrase pairs, parsed from Charles Henry Robinson's Dictionary of the Hausa Language, Volume II (English–Hausa), 3rd edition, Cambridge University Press, 1914.

This is the English→Hausa training lexicon behind Murya — a Hausa-first voice assistant — used for translation fine-tuning, lexical retrieval, and Hausa embedding warm-start. Released as its own dataset so it's citable and reusable independent of the Murya project.

Source & copyright

The Internet Archive lists this scan as NOT_IN_COPYRIGHT (evidence dated 2007, for a stated 1914 publication) — public domain. Digitized by the University of Toronto Robarts Library.

• —Internet Archive item: dictionaryofhaus02robiuoft
• —Original: Robinson, Charles Henry. Dictionary of the Hausa Language, Vol. II, English–Hausa. 3rd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914.

Format

JSON Lines, one entry per line:

{"source_en": "abandon", "target_ha": "hari", "context": "tr. v. hari, har.", "provenance": "robinson_1914_vol2"}

• —source_en — English headword or phrase
• —target_ha — Hausa translation
• —context — original dictionary gloss (part of speech, usage note, or surrounding entry text), useful for disambiguation
• —provenance — fixed source tag, robinson_1914_vol2

Multiple Hausa senses for one English headword appear as separate rows (e.g. "abandon" → "hari" and "abandon" → "har" both present).

Known limitations

• —Early-1900s missionary-lexicography orthography and spelling conventions predate modern standard Hausa orthography (no ɓ/ɗ/ƙ hooked-consonant distinction as written today, tone unmarked). Treat as a semantic/lexical resource, not an orthography reference.
• —Parsed via OCR + heuristic entry-splitting from the Archive.org text layer; not manually proofread against the original scan entry-by-entry.
• —English→Hausa direction only (Robinson's Vol. II). No reverse (Hausa→English) direction in this file.

Citation

Robinson, Charles Henry. Dictionary of the Hausa Language, Vol. II,
English-Hausa. 3rd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914.
Digital scan: Internet Archive, University of Toronto Robarts Library,
item `dictionaryofhaus02robiuoft`. https://archive.org/details/dictionaryofhaus02robiuoft

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