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Universal Free Dictionary
Zdenek Broz writes "The all free dictionaries project focuses on maintaining free dictionaries (now more than 90 with more than 3,300,000 translations). We are designing a new system which will unite them all into one universal dictionary for all languages. The universal dictionary will be soon available for free under GPL."
This seems to be entirely useful. The proposed design looks like they will have a quick dictionary lookup on a word in the language being used with a definition, and cross-reference to the same word in other languages. That could be entirely useful, and anyone who enjoys Engrish might wish to help add that module (mostly for fun), but it looks like this project might actually take some of the mystery out of translation. Perhaps Engrish is going to be a thing of the past?
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
... a dictionary which will contain the word GPL
Klingon? Jive? 1337 5P34K? Pig Latin?
Sounds like a PR stunt for the company
so close, yet so far
I'm all for this but dictionary.com,Babelfish, and google meet my dictionary needs.
-Teiresias
Why not just contribute to Wiktionary?
Or if they don't like the possibility of vandos, why not fork Wiktionary?
Le français vous intéresse?
Great! Now I can add all of my typos and misspellings to the dictionary and the slashdot spelling weenies won't be able to say anything.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
I think a multi-language Urban Dictionary for slang would be far more useful.
The GPL is a license for computer code. Don't you mean public domain, or the Creative Commons license?
http://www.wiktionary.org/ has been doing this for a long time, what's wrong with them?
Wiktionary is a pretty good dictionary also, maybe they should join forces?
Aren't there much better licenses for dictionaries than the GPL? Creative Commons comes to mind. What does the Guttenberg project use?
Moderation Totals: Flamebait=2, Troll=1, Redundant=1, Insightful=6, Overrated=1, Underrated=1, Total=12. (not mine)
support Klingon language? I never could understand it.Google has Klingon language but cant translate it.
The Russian "cat" example doesn't include the masculine cat, "KOT."
So, I wouldn't be able to translate "blue jeans" from another langauge? This really sucks, because on of my High School spanglish teachers taught us that it translated to "bluyins" in Spanish, and I've really never trusted that...
Perhaps they should wait until they have a more robust system before making these types of announcments?
Why don't more people put syllable boundary markers in their phonetic transcriptions?
Me lost me cookie at the disco.
The flaw I see is that English is used as the base language. That creates a severe problem. English is not neutral. It's severely screwed up, as languages go, and is very hard to learn. There are multiple meanings of most of the words in the english language. Oh, sure, it's easy to use english, if that's the language the developers speak. But I do not think it best. Esperanto would be a good choice. Each word has basically one meaning. It has few grammar exceptions. Lots of translations into esperanto end up being more accurate than translations into other languages for multiple reasons.
But definitely, English is the opposite of a good choice.
Drop me a line at:
Key ID: 0x54D1D809
So what are you doing to find the similarities between languages? It would seem that if I searched for an Italian word, I would get the Latin root and them the related languages. This is more than a dictionary this is 65,000 years of human history, if you so allow it!
Oh, and IMNAL - I am not a linguist.
/usr/bin/grep -i -E meaning life.txt
Chambers and Cambridge dictionaries forced to become GPL after they were found to contain words from the new GPL universal dictionary.
However, will this be prone to user introduced errors, intentional or otherwise? It seems that this would be even more difficult to track than a wiki. After having a look at the site it's not readily apparent what sort of measures are in place to track/prevent these issues. All in all though, a great idea. Hats off to all the folks behind the site.
All your noun are belong to us!
sigs, as if you care.
igpay atinlay ouyay (how the uckfay do you write 'insensitive') odclay
Suchetha
learn from yesterday, plan for tomorrow, party tonight
or one out of three ain't bad
it would be *very* cool if there was a decent way to handle different "levels" of each language.
For example, in quebec we use the word "char" for your car... "j'vais prenez le char ce soir", i'm going to take the car tonight.
this isn't *good* french, but it's good quebec slang. it's how people actually speak. however you wouldn't use it if you were trying to write a cover letter, but you might use it if you were writing an email to a french friend. A dictionary where you could specify "speaking" vs "writing", or even "polite" vs "friendly", some way of really characterizing the KIND of translation you want.
expressions too... sometimes expressions can be directly translated, other times you'll sound like an idiot if you just use the same phrase you would have said in english. Something that recognizes common phrases and gives corresponding expressions in another language would be incredibly useful.
I guess what I'm getting at is it's annoying when you look up a word in a translation dictionary and get like 4 or 5 choices but you have no idea what the difference between them is, or it gives you a word that actually is correct, but is so rarely used that when you say it people look at you funny.
Free downloadable plain-text dictionaries
...is all the dictionary I'll ever need.
Yes, I'm an English major with no life.
Three quick comments:
1) If English is so hard to learn, it's amazing that so many people speak it.
2) A human language is not a programming language. While programming languages have to be precise, human language does not always have to be precise. How boring would that be? Our libraries would be much smaller if our languages were so strict.
3) The primary value of human languages is communication, so as long as you can speak it and communicate, this primary function is satisfied.
As a funny note, I returned home this evening and found a sign on the front door of the building that said 'WET PANT'. Incorrect spelling, but I got the message
Simpy
And for a convenience, it will automatically correct your spelling as follows:
Actually what is needed is a phrase translator (like those electronic pocket thingies you can buy ..they're great ..especially the ones that will actually say out the phrase for you) .. Rather than just translating words .. a dictionary that translates actual common sentences would add tremendous value. This is important because a dictionary doesnt tell you diddly on how to construct a meaningful sentence let alone help you understand common idioms.
Idiot - noun
1 usually offensive : a person affected with idiocy
2 : a foolish or stupid person
3 : Luigi Dipthong, who insulted me deeply by saying that I had completely misdrawn the control unit of my favorite processor.
What about that small African tribe that communicates by clacking their tongue? Will it translate that?
There are translation for some of the words, for exemple House:
* Arabic: (bayt)
* Basque: etxe
* Breton: ti m
* Catalan: casa
* Chineses:
* Czech: dm m
* Dutch: huis n
* Esperanto: domo
* Estonian: maja
* Fijian: vale
* Finnish: talo (1, 2), house (3)
* French: maison f
* Frisian: hûs n
* Galician: casa f
* German: Haus, n
* Greek: oiko, spiti (modern Greek)
* Hebrew:
* Hungarian: ház
* Indonesian: rumah
* Italian: casa
* Japanese: (, ie), (, tatemono)
* Latin: domus f
* Low Saxon: Huus n
* Malay: rumah
* Persian: (xne)
* Polish: dom m
* Portuguese: casa f
* Romanian: cas f
* Romanica: casa f, domo m
* Slovene: hisa f
* Spanish: casa f
* Russian: m
* Swedish: hus n
* Turkish: ev n
My city: Barcelona.
... and it said, "Something that happens to most Japanese men before sex"?!?!
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1) Not many people speak it natively. It is, however, a required second language for any kind of work in commerce or technology
2) A dictionary isn't a book of rules. It's a book of a general concenus on the meanings and spellings of words.
3) The primary value of language is commumication, but human language has evolved into something much more meaningful than communicating that there is saber tooth tiger over yonder. Advanced human speech is one of the only things that seperates us from the rest of the animal kingdom. Personally, I think it's a stupid thing to try and simplify speech. Doublethink, anyone?
Glossaries like these have their uses, and I sometimes use them myself when I'm reading something and don't know a word, but good dictionaries go way beyond these. To begin with, you often can't adequately translate a word from one language with a single word from another language. It often takes at least a phrase, and sometimes there isn't any straightforwad translation and a fairly elaborate explanation is necessary. Furthermore, especially if you're going into the language you don't know well, it is often necessary to have information about the grammar of the word in order to be able to use it properly. What case does the object of a verb have to be? Which conjugation does a verb belong to?
The other major limitation of simple glossaries like these is that they don't work very well for languages with complex word-formation where the citation form is not easily obtained from the inflected forms. For instance, in English it isn't a big deal to look up a plural noun because in almost all cases you just remove s or es, so someone who reads, e.g. trapezoids doesn't need to know very much in order to guess that it is a form of trapezoid and look it up under trapezoid. However, there are languages in which words have hundreds or thousands of forms and in which it is quite difficult to figure out what to look a word up under. Creating dictionaries for such languages that can be used by inexpert users is a long-standing problem for which electronic dictionaries offer a solution, but such dictionaries won't be simple glossaries; they will be databases with morphological analyzers as front ends. I've got a paper about this problem in Athabaskan languages here.
Im applauding the intent and purpose behind this endeavor, but I wonder how familiar the members of this project are with the wonders of babelfish poetry. My favorite is (before it went 509) on nerdling.net Google's archived HTML of the PDF is at http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:BcoMz56XxDcJ: nerdling.net/issues/Issue11.pdf
interest; This is reaching project' it is present on. As for that d' The recreation of price autres and I of times l hilarity, you is which they must predpologat'.
Now, if I can just find someone to extract this stupid fish...
Some of the texts on the Free Dictionaries project are listed as being licensed under the GPL. Can you mingle public-domain text with GPL'ed text?
This is a matter of practical concern. I'm overseeing a project which is digitizing copyright-expired dictionaries of the early Germanic languages. Some of the texts on my site are in German, and I'd like to use the GPL'ed Free Dictionaries German-English word list to add a feature to my project which allows you to click a German word to get a translation for that word.
Question 1: Are there provisions of the GPL which would prevent the a GPL'ed dictionary from being intermingled in this matter with existing public domain texts?
Another problem. The texts in my project contain many rare German words relating to Iron Age technology which are unlikely to be in the Free Dictionaries list, so I'd like to add my own supplemental list of words.
Question 2: Can I assign my supplemental word list to the public domain, or do I have to license it under the GPL as a modification to the original word list?
Doublethink is doubleplus good.
Get me a meat pie floater!
We haven't even gone into Eubonics, or the difference between the Queen's English and American English. English not only borrows words and phrases from other languages, it borrows grammar, and oddly. This is where all the exeptions come from.
Would that be two, to, or too? Would you use there or their? Most Americans can't spell "their", without their word processor. These things make a language hard. Shall I talk about am/is/are/was/were? I mean, come on. How many different ways can you bastardize "to be?" "To be, or not to be," was dead on. If English weren't your native tongue you'd be having troubles with it too.
Come to think of it, how many times this week have I heard some stupid question like, "You be goin' to tha sto(re)? Pick me up some smokes, aight?" Explain that one to a non-native. Heck, explain it to your (failing) English teacher. He/She is baffled, too. Again, I must point to Eubonics. I've actually had to interpret English to another English speaker! I'd say the primary function is not satisfied by English in it's current (screwed up!) state.
Drop me a line at:
Key ID: 0x54D1D809
One dictionary... to rule them all! BWAHAHAHA!!!!
I've been looking for something like this for the linux system in my wife's classroom. Not because of anything that special about the way definitions are developed, but just because it can be downloaded and used offline. (don't ask me why they can't run the network to the classroom, but the haven't). This could become one of the most popular programs there after Connect-4.
Foreign words do not always map onto each other, so there's going to be problems with nuance. It's probably redundant in saying this, but many words have no English equivalent - the German unheimlich for instance. Even the French uncanny doesn't quite do it justice.
I hope the English on the dictionary is better than the English on the homepage eg "There will be always the backbone description" and "will lead contributors to translate English words into other language." (mis)
Si tacuisses philosophus mansisses. If you had kept quiet, you would have remained a philosopher.
I'll finally be able to look up American and see what the words mean in English.
Professional or amateur?
Semantic domains or a handful of celebrities deciding what words mean?
OED or American Heritage?
WET PANT
Clearly a left-over cue card from an x-rated movie that was filmed on the premises (and you missed it!)
"Okay baby.. you look so HOT, but you're having a little trouble remembering what to do. Don't worry, what I'm gonna do is hold up these signs, 'kay? First is 'FLIRTING EYES'.. then when sees you and walks over, it's 'INNOCENT GIRL'. Then he'll squeeze your tits, that's time for 'WET PANT'. Yah baby you don't have to remember a word of this, just watch the signs? Okay?"
How's this going to work with language specific words and concepts like schaudenfraude?
Slashdot: News for Nerds, Stuff that matters only to them
I just finished H.L. Mencken's "the American Language". What Mencken maintained was that American English was easy to learn to speak, as compared to many other languages, but writing it is harder, due to factors such as the lack of phonetics. Recently, an acquaintance of mine who is originally from Poland and thus cannot read too well in English, asked me what a bumper sticker said(he did not understand it); he proceeded to pronounce literally: "I LOVE MY GUITAR". Guitar as pronounced by most Americans should be rendered geetar instead of a literal rendering of the sound of each letter. When I prounounced it for him correctly instead of phonetically as he did, he understood the bumper sticker and recognized the word. There is a gap between spoken English and written because of the lack of phonetics, native speakers do not notice this as much. Another example is wished, which is usually pronounced wisht by most. There are many other such examples.
It looks to me like the Wordnet description is the "base language", and English is merely a quick sanity check. Try searching for "cat" in the English/French section.
Copyrights, Patents, Trademarks: temporary loans from the Public Domain, not real property ("intellectual" or otherwise)
Khoisan languages use click as part of pronounciation
Slashdot: News for Nerds, Stuff that matters only to them
and maybe I didn't look hard enough but are these just translations rather than definitions? Useless to me!
...SCO sues the operators of GPL Dictionary for using words that were originally included in source code allegedly developed by SCO...
You listed almost every language other than Armenian. Shame on you!
A blog like any other.
EnglishWelsh
Sheep fucker.No matches found
EnglishGerman
2 World Wars and 1 World Cup. No matches found
EnglishIrish
Drunken terrorist. No matches found
Can someone tell me the point of this?
The thing that is against Esperanto is this:
If I learn Italian, if I go to Italy I can be in a place where the majority of the people speak Italian. Upon learning Esperanto you cannot say there is any place on this globe where you can be certain that you can converse with the locals in Esperanto. No matter how perfect an artifical langauge is, it is still artifical and does not have a geographic hegemeony anywhere.
This is why Esperanto has not taken off, despite pedant linguists with their false hopes, and why Esperanto will never take a hold in all likeliness.
Soon to be integrate with wearable PCs, then roam anywhere and have tiny headset translate what foreigners say to you. Speaker will talk back at them so they understand what you say as well!
I suggest you read Slashdot
Just today I was trying to prototype some ideas on a dictionary idea I had.
:-)
My idea was to create a tutorial for learning AMSLAN (American Sign Language) and to use texts from Project Gutenburg or other public domain works. One (of several) problems though is that English is rife with homographs... words that are spelled alike but have different meanings. In the case of sign language, a sign for a bow in a little girl's hair might appear extremely odd if the sign for bow of a ship popped up in automatic substitution.
Dealing with the homographs is a problem, but I see that this site's plan already takes a stab at dealing with such things (in their cat example). I'd love it if they went to the trouble of also including a bit of AMSLAN (either in animations or static pictures) as that might inspire me with some help in the solution.
Ideally, my desire is to get an automated library that could read a text (possibly read by the human sorting the homographs). And allow a user to listen to the reading and watch the text (while learning English), listen to the reading only (if hearing impaired), watch a silent sign language presentation with subtitles (to learn sign language), or watch a silent presentation through signing (if reading in silence is preferable).
Just kind of bizarre that the idea struck the same day as this article appeared, I thought.
Go ahead and contribute to the wiktionary.
You can't take the sky from me...
Check out the bottom of the page. It really says "What means FDicts?" Measure once, check twice!
First off, every language does not have its demotic matching its literary written form, this is not mutual to English. With time things like pronunciation evolves and changes, spellings morph, etc. Spoken English is relatively easy to master. You are right though about written American English being much harder. Of course it is easy for an invented and not evolved language such as Esperanto to have its literary form matching its spoken, for it to have sane spelling and such. It does not have to deal with the chaotic forces of evolution, it is not a living thing.
One of the things that Greek has going for it, is there not a single nation save the Greeks using the Greek alphabet. This means Greeks cannot take a French word from French without first naturalizing in Greek to conform to the Greek alphabet and the sounds available in the Greek palate. English on the other hand can and does unfortunately borrow too often foreign words from languages with the shared Latin alphabet without assimilating them to the English language. This is part of the reason why written Greek is so phonetic and written English is so not.
One dictionary to rule them all!
"There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people."--Howard Zinn
1337 5P34K 1s F0r 0ld p3opl3
1. Translating at the word level is not the best idea. You should break it down to phrases. For example, references to "red herring" are not likely to be discussing colors or birds.
;-)
2. You should be able to tie more than one entry in the same language. i.e. Two ways in French to express the concept behind an English word.
3. Why should any language be the "backbone"? What's the English equivalent of "deja vu"?
Here's a better table structure:
create table phrase (
id very big number,
language very big number,
freq number,
phrase large unicode,
partofspeech unicode,
constraint fk_phrase_language FOREIGN KEY (language) REFERENCES phrase(id),
constraint pk_phrase PRIMARY KEY (id)
);
create table translation (
id very big number,
constraint pk_translation PRIMARY KEY (id)
);
create table transvector (
translation very big number,
phrase very big number,
constraint fk_transvector_translation FOREIGN KEY (translation) REFERENCES translation(id),
constraint fk_transvector_phrase FOREIGN KEY (phrase) REFERENCES phrase(id),
constraint pk_transvector PRIMARY KEY (translation, phrase)
);
In this scheme, definitions are just low frequency phrases connected to the word they define through a translation. A single English phrase could (should?) belong to more than one translation. At the very least there should be one translation to connect it to its definition. Another translation could connect it to a second English definition. Each of those translations might be connected to different phrases in other languages.
This table structure could be improved upon, but hopefully you get the idea despite it being neither English nor German, nor even SQL.
what would be the best is they publish it as a web service and then people like you and me make clients to access them from applications running in the system tray.
Is it really possible for the "new system" to unite the dictionary to cover all languages. This would seem to ignore the different peculiarities (for lack of a better term) of any specific language. While a spanish word may easily be equated to a french word or an italian word (because they are all closely related and are romance languages) it may not be as easy to equate a spanish word to a chinese word. or even an english word (remember that contrary to some people's belief english is not a romance language, it is germanic although it has absorbed words from romance languages). I don't know where I'm going with this....but where are the credentials for the people involved with this project? I think the concerns some people have raised about the Wikipedia are way more valid here.
"Physics is to math what sex is to masturbation." - Richard Feynman
Having taken Chinese I this term, I have learned that there's a whole lot more to a language than just vocabulary. In order to be a useful English-killer or monolinguism-killer, a language site needs to have information on how to pronounce words, how to write all of the glyphs used in the language (which might not be important if it uses a Latin-based script and so does your native language, but a lot of languages don't), and some idea of how to construct a useful sentence. (Word order, how to conjugate verbs/decline nouns, use of measure words/particles/prepositions, even synonyms and homonyms..) Also useful would be free media in the language -- TV shows, music, menus, newspapers -- but I know this would be very difficult to host effectively. My Chinese textbook's name translates as "Chinese Listening, Speaking, Reading and Writing". Developing skill with all of these facets of a language is part of gaining facility with it.
:).
I would love a free-content languages database, full of audio samples of native speakers and grammar rules, but this isn't quite there yet. I do hope something like it gets off the ground, though, because monolinguism is a terrible disease in a global community
Ethan
Another example of English idioms is that yellow warning sign many janitors use after mopping up a spill. It has an icon of a fellow with arms in the air and his leg cocked to the side like a dog. The imperative label "WET FLOOR" could easily be confused as a command to a non-English speaker.
Without even thinking I tried to translate "fuck" from English to Japanese(it didn't work) - for some reason swear words are always the most popular first translations......
Oh man, A free Dictionary under GPL! I'm there! No more long weekends Brute-Forcing my friend's email account anymore. Yippee!!
-----
Make Love not [Browser] War!
While it is easy to make fun of Eubonics, I believe that it should be taken seriously.
Eubonics is special language. It is a 'pidgin' language that is entirely based on English.
When the African people were brought to America, they were captives. They came from a wide variety of tribes and languages. They were enslaved and seperated from others who spoke their language. They were forced to learn English not only to understand their captors but to communicate among themselves.
As the Africans became African-Americans over a four hundred year period, they developed a special language that had to be transparent, childlike, and seemingly harmless to the captors and still be able to communicate as adults in captivity to each other. The language that evolved, African-American English, is very different from standard English in sense that it is always changing; constantly recycling standard English into completely new phrases that expressed hidden meanings that were understood by the African Americans but appeared to be harmless childish gibberish to the European Americans. This has become the primary characteristic of the language.
No other language in the world changes as fast as African American English. As soon as the EuroAmericans start using a term or phrase from AfroAmerican, it goes out of fashion in AfroAmerican communities.
While this language is excellent for maintaining cultural identity and spirit in the face of long-term enslavement and systematic cultural disintegration, its hyper-fluid nature makes it not good for science and middle-class stability.
As the African-American people move out of the era of enslavement and cultural isolation and into the American middle class, Eubonics will probably pass also. It was a powerful and useful tool, and it served its purpose well. Jive talkin' deserves to be taken seriously as a linguistic discipline.
I, for one, welcome our new linguistic overlords.
I doubt anytime within your lifetime or even mine(I am in my early 20s) Eubonics will disappear. If you ever watch MTV's Real World no matter what season there is a recurring character: angry black male. Always, he brings up that it is impossible for others not black to understand him, becaus' dey is jus' not blak enuf!
S' long as de be so many blaks ho cant be understood by no white folks, eubonics is here to stay. Also if you watch MTV, you will always see these rappers who get too much airtime given they have no artistic skills; it is common for these rappers to thank rap for helping them get of the ghetto, they stress they would not have left any other way. As if going to a technical school and learning a vocation or going to a junior college, or even applying for a job is not a solution, only rap, a pipe dream for most is the only way, only the music dawwg.
When I used to live in a predominately black neighborhood, I tried to act like these hood rats to blend in and make friends, but even then you cannot not fit in, if you are not black(unless you are rich ask Eminem). The whole reason they are hood rats in the first place is the departure point of why they will not accept whites as close friends. Think of how Karamo on Real World wanted MJ to be his "boy" but unlike the hood rats, MJ did not "have his back". Now I live in a much better neighborhood with half of the population Hispanic in the town(East coast Hispanics not the barrio hood rat Hispanics of the West Coast). My brother never locked his Camaro and left his mp3 player on the seat all the time, it still has not been stolen. In the old hood, this cd player would not last a week. Alot of the reasons why Eubonics exists is because of the mentality that says rap is the only way Snoop can get out of the hood, that the black guy on Real World is living in an arfitifical box called "Whites always be misunderstanin meh". If you are wondering why I mentioned MTV so much, now that I thankfully do not live in a black hood, my contact with that world I left behind is mostly limited to TV. Where I live now more than half of the blacks are like normal people who do not have the hood mentality, the rap is the only way to escape from the ghetto mentality, the manner of bad habits described in the book "Pine Barrens" where negroes where bused in to work the fields in the Pine Barrens and the more incompetent among them spent all the money they made on the bus when the bus driver sold alcohol and other items after the days work was over. Some of the negroes around these parts where the stupid dew rags, most don't. In my old neighborhood when I last went, dew rags were fiercely represented. One of my black friends said of town full of black hood rats(East Orange, NJ): "I would not want to park my car there ever." Many others would concur.
This is the principle: so long as the blacks conform to society at large, they become like normal human beings, except darker. So long as there are blacks that build mental ghettos, produce a puerile culture(just think of rap) and even infest mainstream society with this fetid culture, so long as they do stupid things as working all day in the Pine Barrens of NJ only to spend all their earnings before the end of the bus ride home, we will have eubonics.
"English more simple than other languages"
Its kind of hard to take them seriously about building a dictionary when they use poor grammar in their faq. I'm a little uncertain on the future of this project.
Why Q Entries in FAQ use Structured Differently English.
Are maintainers FAQ also architechts Backbone of English?
Am I Possible Detecting liability project here?
"Sometimes you've got to kick at the darkness till it bleeds daylight" Bruce C0ckburn
Here's a free one that I bookmarked a couple years ago. Once you figure out the interface, you can put in a a word and have the translation from one, or several languages at once.
http://magic-dic.homeunix.net/
I see you have been modded up for being shortsighted and daft. The reason why English has its Eubonics and other dialects is because it is a real language not a laboratory language. It interacts with other languages, it is bound by and to geography, it acts and reacts to new situations. It is not some invented ghost of a language, the pet project of a linguist and his zealot followers.
It is no accident that when the Italian peninsula was reduced to a series of petty Republics the Italian language branch after hundreds of years of geographic and political isolation from other Italian speaking principalities produced a cacophany of dialects along the political and geographic faultlines, more or less. If Esperanto had to deal with a class of slaves isolated from their native African tribal societies by Esperanto speaking European colonists in the Crown Colonies, maybe these former tribesmen would evolve an Esperabonics. Esperanto the apparition that it is, has not yet produced such an evolution, because it has never been adopted widely.
You can be an Esperanto elitist now. If Esperanto was ever adopted by a nation you would see a dialect right away. The nation that adopted it, would evolve the language while the rest of the Esperanto speakers would not accept this coup and would not likely accept their new localisms, locutions, loan words, etc. The same as Spanish spoken in Spain differs from that of Mexico or how English differs from the USA to the UK, etc. The second you elitists get what you want for your Esperanto it will have to deal with the chaos of evolution, its invented order will be destroyed that very moment. It is like when a local band becomes famous and the jealous local groups label them a sellout for not wanting to eat Ramen noodles forever and live in their parents' basement.
Will it make us one step closer to The Universal Translator (as seen in Star Trek series?).
Two examples: the has been translated to bovendien, which is the dutch word for moreover. if has been translated to de, which is the dutch word for the.
I know this is a community effort and one should not whine, but instead contribute. My only point is; don't get too excited. In the current form, at least the dutch - english translation is useless.
I tried the Swedish -> English dictionary and used the "translate prepared words" feature. It suggests words to add missing translations for, however basically all it suggested were other forms of translated words. For example, it wished to have a translation for the swedish "typer" which in english is "types". However, "typ" which in english is "type" is already translated. That feature gets pretty useless since it gets filled with special *forms* of various words when the base form exists.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Mr. Garrison: Chef, what did you do when white people stole your culture?
Chef: Well, we black people always just tried to stay out in front of them.
Mr. Slave: How did you do that?
Chef: Well, like what I was sayin'. People always used to say, "I'm in the house" instead of "I'm here". But then white people started sayin' that. So we switched it to "in the hishouse". Hishouse became hishishouse, then white folks started sayin' that, so we had to change it to hisay, then to the hisa, which we had to later change to hisafasiza. And now because white people say hisafasiza, we have to say flippity floppity floop.
"j'vais prenez le char ce soir"
Actually, that would be:
"j'vais prendre le char ce soir"
I'm glad I contributed into making this sentence a good example of bad French, hey hey.
...would have been my immediate choice of translation. Ein unheimliches Schloß, a scary castle. Am I missing something?
There should be some common syntax to handle these cases. (I could not find one and I actually looked. There was even a post in the forums about the same problem.)
Espen Arnesen
Insert `fortune -o` here
Interesting, I wonder if it somehow could be used with Babylon Pro?
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
ReVo is a GPL Esperanto dictionary. It also provides translations to other languages.
Oh well, can't say I was actually depending on it to have it.
Would've been nice, though.
If all else fails... RTFM
Mods: Ha Ha Ha
Interestingly, boatloads of words everywhere, especially in Science (Medicine, Chemistry, ...) and Humanities where derived from Greek.
Try "philosophy", "catarrh" (may you never contract one), "energy".
Does anyone know if they plan to run a DICT server on this information?
This sig has been deprecated.
Maybe they could improve their design by adding context to the english words, or maybe to ALL words in ANY language? For example (incorrectness possible, I'm not an arab speaker):
h or ical)
foundation/base(engineering,housebuilding,metap
= al Qaeda(engineering,housebuilding,metaphorical)
the loo/the sit(colloq.,sanitary)=
al Qaeda(colloq.,sanitary)
a foundation(organisation,group)=
Al Qaeda(organisation,group)
Al Qaeda(terror,name)=
Al Qaeda(terror,name)
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
I'm interested in Esperanto, but your email address is not listed on Slashdot. Mind if we correspond? I can be reached at kwtm-zrezwtid@tamlylin.net
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
"""
People from sci.lang google group have already discovered possible problems of this concept.
"""
google group? for fuck's sake.
FP.
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
really?
So what's your take on open-source software then?
Are you of the persuasion that its
evil?
un-american?
a cancer on society?
Or does it smack of communism a bit too much for you?
I just noticed on that site (on the left side)that one of the phrases you can look up is "slashdot effect"
Boomhauer from King of the Hill would be a good example of this.
If you want to know idiom and construction, get yourself a good grammar and USE IT. I know they aren't easy to come by, but how else would one learn to properly place modal verbs or conjugate a pluperfect subjunctive?
...is actually pretty easy to learn.
When computers know all the words, they become intelligent, and take over the world!
(No really. Dictionary-based natural language generation has been one of the least productive approaches int he past 60 years.)
Oh, that's easy. That's a dialect of a language. Yes, sometimes different dialects of the same language can be impenetrable to native speakers of a dialect. That's what happens with natural languages.
Have there been any children taught Esperanto as their primary language? Any contradictions between Esperanto and the native human language-processing instinct would show up then, when the language spoken by the children deviates from the One True Esperanto.
--Rob
Towards the Singularity.
Why not Wiki-Dicky?
Ladies and Gentlemen of this supposed jury, dictionary weenies would certainly want you to believe my client was issuing substandard definitions, confounding their critics and confusing the multitudes, and they make a good case. Hell, I almost felt pity myself. But Ladies and Gentlemen of this supposed jury, I have one final thing I want you to consider.
Ladies and Gentlemen, this is Chewbacca. Chewbacca is a Wookiee from the planet Kashyyyk who carried a gun and ran from the mob. But Chewbacca lives on the planet Endor. Now think about it. That does not make sense. Why would a Wookiee, an eight-foot-tall Wookiee, want to live on Endor with a bunch of two-foot-tall Ewoks. That does not make sense.
But more important, you have to ask yourself what does this have to do with this case. Nothing. Ladies and Gentlemen, it has nothing to do with this case. It does not make sense. Look at me. I'm a lawyer defending a free online dictionary and I'm talkin' about Chewbacca. Does that make sense? Ladies and Gentlemen I am not making any sense. None of this makes sense.
And so you have to remember when you're in that jury room deliberating and conjugating the Emancipation Proclamation, does it make sense? No. Ladies and Gentlemen of this supposed jury it does not make sense. If Chewbacca lives on Endor you must acquit.
I know he seems guilty. But ladies and gentlemen this is Chewbacca. Now think about that for one minute. That does not make sense. Why am I talking about Chewbacca when billions of dollars of unrealized pageviews are on the line? Why? I'll tell you why. I don't know. It doesn't make sense. If Chewbacca does not make sense you must acquit. Here look at the monkey , look at the silly monkey.
The defense rests.
Llo is a prolly dictionary, BUT it is not GPL or similar license. You cannot download translation database for whatever use you want.
Use:
- dict.cc
- tu-chemnitz
instead of leo, you can also contribute or use offline.
_______________
freedict.de
Well, looked like I would have had to throw some comma additions and a capitalization correction your way, but you preempted my strike with that conditional 'weenie'-clause...damned you, smartass, you win.
As you already know, your system (even with 2 tables per language) is ridden with problems that would make it virtually useless. Fortunately, there is a solution. It is a hard job, and no one has ever succeeded in doing it right - but you have the advantage of the internet, and this might be a decisive factor.
:)
First, I will mention yet another problem: even if you have two table for each language (English -> OtherLanguage and OtherLanguage -> English), you will not be able to make translations between two non-english languages.
This is even more true because the language you chose as a backbone (English) is a very concise, ambiguous language, and it has many words that may be translated into several different words in other languages. E.g. quite often English has no differentiation for feminine or plural.
Example. Imagine that I want to translate from French to Italian. I take the French word "directrice", which is a *female* director (as opposed to "directeur", which is male). There is no special word for that in English. The dictionary will probably come up with the word "director", which will be translated as two words in italian: one for male director, one for female director.
So a purely female word will give me two results, one of which is obviously wrong because it's male! It's just an example. There are many more. Natural languages *are* ambiguous, that's why computer translation is so hard !
The only solution is that you should not organise your backbone structure by *words*. You should organise it by *meanings*. Your backbone should not be a list of english, french or chinese words, it should be a large list of abstract entries (e.g. numbers), in which every single entry would correspond to a totally unique meaning.
You would also need "description tables", one per language, which would link each of these entries to a small description of this unique meaning in the target language. Finally, you would need translation tables, one per language, which would link every word in the language with all the correct meanings for this word.
For example, in the table, entry 43597 would correspond to "female director", while entry 43552 would correspond to "male director". The 43597th entry in the english description table would read: "A woman who controls, commands or organises something". The english translation table would link the word "director" to both entries 43597 and 43552. But the french translation table would only link the word "directrice" to entry 43597.
In this system (if you get it right), translation is guaranteed to be efficient. No loss of precision, no false positives, and no duplication of information. This system is the correct version of what you want to do. The reason why it wasn't done 20 years ago is because it's *horribly difficult*. Who on earth is clever enough to distinguish precisely between all the things that can be expressed in all the languages of the world ?
But you have a major advantage over all your predecessor: the Internet, and the massive cost-free workforce that it can provide, as the Wikipedia project shows. That could change things a lot. Also, in order to start up the project, you might base your initial backbone on a language which is known to be very precise and have minimal ambguity in its words. Esperanto, Chinese (if you take two-character words) or even better Arabic (if you use the full range of all forms of each root - ask someone who knows Arabic to explain) come to mind. Of course, this would only be a starting point and would need to be refined in order to accomodate for all the possible meanings of the world.
Again, it's gonna be tough, but there's no other way to do it. And this thing could really change the way people communicate. Feel up to the challenge ?
Thomas-
IIRC, it is the most common second language. Britain was a major superpower for centuries and the US has been as well. Therefore, English has become a nearly universal language for business and science. Similarly, I remember hearing at one point that French is currently the second most common second language, basically a legacy of when French was the language of culture and royalty in Europe. I've seen several cites of English being the most common second language. I've only heard the French one as heresey.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
the whole point of the gutenberg project is taking books that are in free domain and publish them on the net for free use. You cant put a GPL or a CC on a work that has gone into free domain. Try not beeing such a ignorant shitcock next time you post on /.
end of flaim
. . . until it becomes profitable to take everyone's contributions, close it up, and start charging money. Sort of what Gracenote did with CDDB.
CEE5210S The signal SIGHUP was received.
"We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."
-- Booker T. Washington
Actually, the complexity of English was rather profitable for me in college. Due to my parents being very insistent on my learning proper grammar and spelling (They proofread any paper I wrote and when I spoke incorrectly, they immediately corrected me), I have a fairly intuitive grasp of proper English. Moreover, extensive reading has given me a grasp of the nuances of various words. Honestly, synonyms aren't. Even when words are listed as being equivalent in a dictionary, they carry different connotations, sometimes cultural baggage and sometimes it's just in how they sound. (These days, I supect most people would be more offended if you called them niggardly than if you call them stingy, simply because of how similar it sounds to the racial epithet) ^_^ Anyhow, I would read peoples' papers and made suggestions, receiving a small consulting fee for doing so. In the end, the paper was still in their style and voice, but it expressed what they really wanted said, not what they wrote.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
and someone who speaks two languages is bilingual,
then someone who speaks one language still must be....................
Live Long and Prosper - Thanks Leonard. You are missed.
Two more quick notes:
1) why do you assume my native tongue is English? It's not.
2) You (and a few other people in this thread) completely ignore the context. Combine the context and a few brain cells with a little knowledge of English, and you realize that WET PANT is a misspelling and nothing more.
Simpy
A very useful multi-language dictionary is Logos.it
Yes, actually there have been children who learned Esperanto as the primary language. This happens because the couple will meet at an Esperanto convention, and will speak Esperanto in the home because it is the language they have in common. There's some resistance to changing the language, true, but not as much as you would suspect. It happens. If it did not, it would be a dead language. But the level of change is slight, compared to English. I am convinced that American English is on the verge of a major change, and the only thing holding it back is television. Were it not for mass communication devices such as television and radio, I believe we would be seeing an entirely different language emerge here in the U.S. from English. It would end up eventually being as different as Spanish and Italian. Automobiles help retard that change, too. Of course, I am only speculating.
Drop me a line at:
Key ID: 0x54D1D809
I'm sorry for that assumption. Your mastery of English is amazing. I've traveled around the world and only met a very small handful of non-native English speakers who speak it (or write it) at that level. Usually they were linguists.
Drop me a line at:
Key ID: 0x54D1D809
It seems to have a good collection of words, but no indication of noun gender. Am I missing something?
First words then phrases. Words are more simple than phrases. That is why we start with words.
I recall reading once that most native speakers are not raised by two Esperantists parents of disparate nationality who met at a convention, but rather because one of the parents is an Esperantist and speaks that language exclusively with the child. I was surprised by this, but afterwards discovered that many Esperantist couples stop using Esperanto after the first couple of years of their relationship, switching instead to the national language of one or the other. Esperanto is not a suitable tool for authentic communication, sometimes it takes a few years for people to realise that.
People on slashdot using an acronym and then spelling out the phrase. That defeats the point in using them. No one is going to remember that anyway.
2...things like pronunciation evolves and changes...
3...Of course it is easy for an invented and not evolved language...
4...this is part of the reason why written Greek is so phonetic and written English is so not...
1. Perhaps you were trying to come up with "exclusive"?
2. Things evolve. Thing evolves.
3. Not evolved, huh? This is awkward.
4. That is SO valley girl.
Self-referential sigs are rarely entertaining.
Actually, "real languages" don't HAVE dialects, they ARE dialects. What we think of as standard English is just another dialect of English; it has developed and changed over time, as have all other dialects of English. Scots, American English, Australian English, "standard English": these are all DIALECTS that have developed simultaneously. There was never one single, "correct" version of English from which all the others have diverged; they've all developed alongside each other. The linguist John McWhorter sums it up by saying, "Dialects is all there is."
And yes, if Esperanto acquired NATIVE SPEAKERS, there would eventually be various Esperanto dialects. All languages change over time.
"Ich bin der Zorn Gottes"
Dear Lord--are all linguists leftists?
Actually the "note2" field described at http://www.fdicts.com/concept.php could be used to distinguish meanings, but it probably would require some modification, at least a name change ;-)
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
As an English-speaking American, I would say "what a shit translation" or "what a shitty translation." We tend to minimize the use of articles- "a" and "the" when using curse words.
Then why is Spanish a faster-growing language in the US than English is?
Er... probably because 99.9% of the US speaks English already? I'm answering seriously, but I suspect you're making a joke. Or at least I hope you are...
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
I'm not knocking Slashdot, nor am I specifically knocking this UFD project, but this story and its origin serves to demonstrate one of the inherent flaws in the Slashdot system: anyone can post, even if it's ultimately about himself and anything but objective. This worries me every time I see that the submitter has a conflict of interest.
On the good side of the Slashdot equation, in most cases those conflicts of interest are readily apparent to anyone critical enough to look; if that wasn't so, I wouldn't likely even be able to comment about it because I simply wouldn't know!
I'm just saying it would be nice if I didn't have to be so damned vigilent, if there was a built-in mechanism to shield us all from conflicts of interest, hype, and being duped. At least *here*, if no where else in the world....
"Esperanto is not a suitable tool for authentic communication, sometimes it takes a few years for people to realise that."
So what are they doing in the meantime then, communicating unauthentically?
No, the phenomenon you describe is quite natural, because even esperantists have to live somewhere. If a polish and a swedish esperantist marry and they move to poland, sooner or later the swede has to learn polish. Because learning any language well is HARD, REALLY HARD, the swede needs to maximize exposure to and practice with polish. The second part in particular suffers a lot if they only use E-o in the home. After the child has learned basic esperanto, it makes sense to switch to polish, although it's a bit sad, of course.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
"Actually, the complexity of English was rather profitable for me in college."
The complexity of english benefits every native english speaker who takes a higher education, because you don't have to study and practice hard for seven years in other to communicate with peers in your field. Also, you are able to do so with much more precision, and since it sounds less like baby talk than the english of your average german, you are much more likely to be taken seriously and recieve an intelligent response. If they want to publish in an international journal, they are still dependent on hiring someone like you, who knows the ins and outs of english. The home field advantage of english is huge, and native english speakers universally underestimate it, because they just can't believe english is that hard.
It is, as you who have studied it a bit probably realize.
So if you're one of the people who appreciate the effort the world makes to communicate with you, I thank you. And to all who don't: please don't take it for granted and be self-righteous about it.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
It is the best choice in many situations because it has a lot of compound words and word senses used in contemporary business. For example it may have a whole list of financial terms including a financial word you give it. However it sometimes will have Japanese-style bad English so it is not totally trustworthy. It also does not show phonetic spelling of characters, does not cross reference all words, does not provide the authoritative information a dictionary usually does, etc. So I would recommend you take a look at it (even if you don't understand Japanese, just enter an English word, and paste the Japanese you get back in) to get an idea of what this project might look like when it goes live. The neatest things about it are 1) it often has exactly the term I needed, and I can (usually) tell if the result is questionable; 2) you can enter Japanese or English into a single input field and hit return, that's it. It figures out which dictionary to use; and 3) it's free.
But, you can't download it as far as I can tell (tell me I'm wrong!). It is sponsored by a company.
Personally I am using xjdic_sa which is a shell client for edict, and with wine the Windows client since it has a graphical kanji lookup interface. They don't have enough words - a lot but not all.
I usually try to copy words I look up in a study file separately but like right now I have a thousand lines of xterm history I can scroll up to and I'd like to copy it all to a file (any way how?). So what I would recommend is that you build online and offline clients for this new system that save the words you look up and notify the dictionary (if you agree, say once per invocation or per day) when you didn't find what you wanted. This way you will be able to get users to tell the dictionary what they need and you can vet submissions more easily.
The project sounds interesting but seems not to care about how to look up and input characters in Asian languages. For me, that is part of what I use a dictionary for usually. If you could include a study and testing function it would be quite useful.
That wasn't a troll or flamebait post. Idiots.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!