The maintainer
Who is behind Nabu
Nabu is built and maintained by one person, writing as Ar Vicco <arvicco@nabu.ac>.
A long-time ancient-language enthusiast. The library did not start as a software project; it started as a reading habit that kept outgrowing its bookshelf. Nabu is what that habit looks like once it insists on holding its sources, citing them properly, and searching them across scripts and millennia.
Independent, by design. The maintainer holds no academic affiliation and earns a living as a systems architect in the commercial space. Nabu is built in personal time, with the engineering habits of that day job β tests first, licenses recorded, everything rebuildable β applied to a scholarly library. Independence is also why the projectβs commitments run the way they do: no institutional hosting, no funding horizon to outlive, nothing that cannot be restored from a file copy.
An independent private researcher. The research interest behind the library is twofold: writing systems β how scripts encode language, how they are deciphered, taught, and change hands β and the statistical and diachronic properties of languages, ancient and modern: how vocabularies, spellings, and grammatical habits drift across centuries, and what becomes measurable when enough texts sit in one place under one set of tools. The research desks and the language-stage machinery are instruments of those two questions, and the published nabu-data datasets carry the first results β for the lexicostatistical side, the diachronic lemma-frequency tables (gold lemma frequencies per language at century grain) and the language attestation curve (documents and passages per language Γ century Γ corpus).
Questions and conversation are welcome β by email or through GitHub issues; the About page describes the project itself.