37 Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies, Vol. 10.1, 37–60 © 2011 by Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute and Gorgias Press FORTY YEARS OF SYRIAC COMPUTING GEORGE A. KIRAZ BETH MARDUTHO: THE SYRIAC INSTITUTE ABSTRACT The term “Syriac Computing” was coined in 1992 and took shape in 1995 when the First International Forum on Syriac Computing was held in conjunction with the Second Syriac Symposium in Washington, DC. The term was applied to computer-related activities and projects which support Syriac studies. Syriac computing, however, began much earlier though on a small scale. On the 10 th anniversary of Hugoye and the 15 th anniversary of its parent, Beth Mardutho, whose contributions to Syriac computing are well known, this paper aims to outline the history of Syriac computing and offer some considerations for the future. COMPUTATIONAL LEXICOGRAPHY [1] The first project that is known to me which employed computer systems for the study of Syriac falls within the domain of computational lexicography, and is only known through oral tradition. Stanislav Segert, former Professor at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) from whom I learned this in the mid 1980s, heard that someone at UCLA had encoded Brockelmann’s Lexicon Syriacum on a mainframe computer system back in the 1960s. He attempted to trace down the data during his tenure, but was unable to find anything. One can speculate that at