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."

Comments

Engrish Module?

[mfh]

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?

Re:Engrish Module?

[dancingmad]

The first entry can be "entirely useful."

I always apperciate the English speakers (generally Americans) who think Engrish is some way of life. I wonder what their Japanese skills are (let alone English).

Re:Engrish Module?

[Anonymous Coward]

My skills as far as Nihon-go are atrocious for the amount of time I have spent in Japan. I can say "Wakarimasen" without any accent, which gets funny looks, (and one time a "Yes, you do" response from a professional interpreter). I also know "Futatsu Beeru kudasai" (may have forgot an article in that one,) and "Watashi wa doko desu ka?" and that is about it.

I was always happy to meet anyone who even tried English. At least they made more of an effort that I.

Re:Engrish Module?

[Anonymous Coward]

You might apperciate this.

Re:Engrish Module?

[JanneM]

It won't be a good mapping when neither of the two languages are english, though.

Take an abstract or ambiguous word in one language (that describes a lot of them); it will have multiple related translations in english. Each of them (describing something abstract or ambiguous) will have multiple related translations in the target language. Instead of getting three or four reasonable translation candidates, you end up with several dozen - or more - most of which aren't actually a good fit for the original word.

Having dictionaries for pairs of languages are far, far preferable to going through a third language.

Re:Engrish Module?

[adeydas]

this is a great idea. i just can't wait for it to launch. more power to FOSS... :)

Re:Engrish Module?

[dubl-u]

I always apperciate the English speakers (generally Americans) who think Engrish is some way of life. I wonder what their Japanese skills are (let alone English).

I'm sure the Japanese are just as amused by all the westerners who get tatoos of Japanese characters without getting them checked by a native speaker.

Re:Engrish Module?

[LetterJ]

While the show probably sucks, there's an ad running for a sitcom which has an American telling someone of Asian decent about their tattoo. He claims it says what most of those say, something about eternal love or peaceful waters. The Asian man responds and says, No. It means that in a relationship of 2 men who love each other, you are the one who plays the woman.

Re:Engrish Module?

[Siva]

I'm sure the Japanese are just as amused by all the westerners who get tatoos of Japanese characters without getting them checked by a native speaker.

Same goes for t-shirts and whatnot. My financeé and I always chuckle when we see those in clothing stores, and we wonder how many say things like "stupid foreigner" or similar.

at last

[Anonymous Coward]

... a dictionary which will contain the word GPL

Re:at last

[iamacat]

Not likely, unless it also contains AC, FP and EOPA (every other possible abbreviation). These kind of things should be just expanded and translated as regular phrases.

Also, a dictionary under GPL would be a more horrible abuse of IP than even DMCA and Amazon's one-click. Imagine having to allow people to copy your printed book for free because you looked up french words you wanted to use in your novell on some web site? Surely any knowledge of human languages should be in public domain.

Re:at last

[blowdart]

If it lists GPL as a word I'd be very concerned about the accuracy of the dictionary.

Re:at last

[DrSkwid]

And, for some people, a free dictionary can't come soon enough.

I hope it has a section on correct usage too.

Re:at last

[Mr. Slippery]

Imagine having to allow people to copy your printed book for free because you looked up french words you wanted to use in your novell on some web site?

Please keep the anti-GPL FUD to some sort of rational level, ok?

Using a GPLed dictionary application while writing a document does not make the document a derivative work that must be GPLed, any more than using GNU Emacs to write a novel means the novel must be GPLed.

Does it have support for...

[Anonymous Coward]

Klingon? Jive? 1337 5P34K? Pig Latin?

Re:Does it have support for...

[Anonymous Coward]

No, but if yo' ass tru-ly wanna translate sump'n into jive I suppose yo' ass could go in da house. Besides scratchin' some module 4 Pig Latin an' leet jive shouldn't be t' rock. Step off, Pharoah.

Re:Does it have support for...

[Anonymous Coward]

Actual-like, dair wuz some D-O-fuckin'-S rehab in da early-like 90s dat yo' ass fed it some text stash an' it would translate da damn document t' Jive. IT WUZ fuckin' HILARIOUS!! I think I still have it. Ya' know?

Here is a pretty good one.

Re:Does it have support for...

[Scrameustache]

Klingon? Jive? 1337 5P34K? Pig Latin?

From TFA: Any language can be added anytime.

I can't wait for the Smurf to English dictionary...

: )

Re:Does it have support for...

[Pxtl]

Actually, that thing is teh suck. It doesn't seem to actually swap nouns, adverbs and verbs with "smurf, smurfy, smurfing" or anthing, it just inserts Smurf phrases into the paragraph, and occaisionally the word "Smurf" into nonsensical places. That's pretty weak.

Re:Does it have support for...

[slpalmer]

> Copyright 19104
Looks like someone needs to update their script on ighetto...

Re:Does it have support for...

[iminplaya]

You can always start here.

Universal Free Dicshunary
Education
Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday Decemba' 08, @11:16PM
from de dat-is-a-big-scribblin' dept. Man!
Zdenek Broz scribbles "De all free dicshunaries project focuses on maintainin' free dicshunaries (now mo'e dan 90 wid mo'e dan 3,300,000 translashuns). We is designin' some new system which gots'ta unite dem all into one universal dicshunary fo' all languages. De universal dicshunary gots'ta be soon available fo' free unda' GPL."

( Read Mo'e... | 255 uh 357 comments )

I already have a pretty good dictionary

[teiresias]

I'm all for this but dictionary.com,Babelfish, and google meet my dictionary needs.

Re:I already have a pretty good dictionary

[jrl87]

i think the idea is to consolodate those down into one so you can use one site as apposed to three or how ever many you happen to use

Re:I already have a pretty good dictionary

[goon america]

There's also free/libre wordnet, wiktionary...

Why can't these projects work together? Seems like a lot of wheel-reinvention to me...

Re:I already have a pretty good dictionary

[Scrameustache]

i think the idea is to consolodate those down into one so you can use one site as apposed to three or how ever many you happen to use

For crying out loud, the man gave you 3 direct links to dictionaries! : )

Re:I already have a pretty good dictionary

[UniverseIsADoughnut]

Problem with dictionary.com is it's a very poor dictionary with lots of things that arn't close to words, and a lot of far stretched definitions, it's like a wiki gone bad at times. I use it from time to time, but it's not something I would ever seriously use for a good number of definitions and such.

Re:I already have a pretty good dictionary

[dolmen.fr]

Wiktionary is already available under GFDL. This is far better than AFD that "will be soon available for free under GPL", where "soon" may be "never".
Contributing to such a project is a bad idea if the license is not clear.

Re:I already have a pretty good dictionary

[Scrameustache]

Problem with dictionary.com is it's a very poor dictionary

http://www.m-w.com/dictionary.htm

Webster's is the best. You get definition, etymology, and they even have .wav of the pronounciation! I love it.

Why start a separate project?

[koreaman]

Why not just contribute to Wiktionary?
Or if they don't like the possibility of vandos, why not fork Wiktionary?

Re:Why start a separate project?

[dubl-u]

I think this is more like The Rosetta Project.

GPL Dictionary

[0racle]

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.

Re:GPL Dictionary

[jrl87]

that's great, but you'd still have to look out for the grammar weenies because they make up their own rules so there's no way around them ...

Re:GPL Dictionary

[kfg]

The word is "wiener." -- Edwin Newman

KFG

Re:GPL Dictionary

[Nevenmrgan]

Yeah, awful business that grammar. We'd do much better without it. Or perhaps we should replace it with one of those universal cosmic rules that weren't *invented*, like "he who smelt it, dealt it."

Re:GPL Dictionary

[kfg]

Dude, I was quoting a grammar weenie joke from Newhart.

KFG

Re:GPL Dictionary

[gnu-generation-one]

"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."

Blackadder offers his most enthusiastic contrafibularatories to this project...

Re:GPL Dictionary

[LifesABeach]

I guess step 2 will be a 'Style' guide using the GPL as a base line?

I for one welcome our Grammar Weenie Overlords...

Urban Dictionary

[eln]

I think a multi-language Urban Dictionary for slang would be far more useful.

Re:Urban Dictionary

[gardyloo]

Perhaps. But the problem with slang in general, and "urban slang" especially, is that it is *so* dependent on puns, knowledge of popular (or geek) culture in one particular part of the world, and so forth. I fear that if many of these slang words/phrases are translated, unless the translators are especially good at capturing all or most of the "background" things in a given definition, the whole impact of the slang term will be totally lost. Explaining a joke usually takes the point of the joke and totally chews it up.

Somewhat like translating haikus into English. The whole 5-7-5 thing is fun and challenging, I suppose (I personally hated having to write them in middle school, mainly because it was in lieu of worthwhile reading and writing), but (supposedly; I don't know Japanese) the poems in the parent language probably have a lot of import that the translated-to language may lack.

Then again, a woman at a party once told James Thurber that she'd read a French translation of his My Life and Hard Times, adding, "You know, the book is even better in French!" To which Thurber replied, "Yes---my work tends to lose something in the original."

Re:Urban Dictionary

[Titusdot Groan]

I just checked this out -- an English version of this would be useful -- this dictionary is unmoderated and full of junk!

Re:Urban Dictionary

[Hiro Antagonist]

I'm studying Japanese, and you're dead-on about haikus loosing most of their beauty in translation. Each Japanese syllable is a 'complete' sound, with a consonant and a vowel (with one exception, that being the 'n' nasal stop), haikus are, naturally, ideally matched with their parent language.

What?

[Anonymous Coward]

The GPL is a license for computer code. Don't you mean public domain, or the Creative Commons license?

Re:What?

[m50d]

Many people prefer to use GPL as it's definitely open source and the FDL has some serious problems. As long as you define "source code" and "binary" appropriately, I'd actually reccomend using GPL for everything.

Re-invention of the wheel?

[ownermachina]

http://www.wiktionary.org/ has been doing this for a long time, what's wrong with them?

Re:Re-invention of the wheel?

[xlv]

http://www.wiktionary.org/ has been doing this for a long time, what's wrong with them?

Before reading your post, I wasn't aware of the project. Taking one word at random, "dog", I was surprised by the number of missing entries in the links: canine, pup, dogs, domesticated are amongst the dozens of undefined entries. I don't know exactly how long you mean by a long time but it sure looks incomplete to me...

Re:Re-invention of the wheel?

[clap_hands]

I'm a Wikipedia contributor, but I find the automatic response of "You're criticising a Wiki? How DARE you...stop whining and fix it yourself!" to be very irritating. It's perfectly reasonable for someone to evaluate or criticise a wiki project even if they're not interested in fixing the problems themselves. Or look at it this way; the thread was roughly this:

Ownermachine) Why do we need this "All Free Dictionaries" project? Isn't Wiktionary good enough?
Xlv) It's incomplete.
Batkiwi) Stop whining and fix it yourself!

Re:Re-invention of the wheel?

[justins]

I'm a Wikipedia contributor, but I find the automatic response of "You're criticising a Wiki? How DARE you...stop whining and fix it yourself!" to be very irritating.

It's the same attitude that Open Source robots tend to take when someone criticizes their work, too. Often it's a pathetic way to rationalize shoddy work, born from an inability to accept criticism gracefully.

Re:Re-invention of the wheel?

[g0at]

http://www.wiktionary.org/ [wiktionary.org] has been doing this for a long time, what's wrong with them?

The ridiculous name?

-b

Re:Re-invention of the wheel?

[zCyl]

I'm a Wikipedia contributor, but I find the automatic response of "You're criticising a Wiki? How DARE you...stop whining and fix it yourself!" to be very irritating.

The important point is often missed. It's not that you HAVE to fix it, it's that you CAN fix it. So if a particular thing bothers you enough, go ahead and fix it. If not, then it probably doesn't bother you that much.

Re:Re-invention of the wheel?

[pjp6259]

I know, I think they should have called it wikidici.org . That's a much better name.

Re:Re-invention of the wheel?

[batkiwi]

It wasn't an automatic response. He had a specific example of information he already knew that he was looking for as a test.

Were he actually researching something, then it'd obviously be silly to expect him to contribute, as if he knew, why would he be researching it?

I also didn't say anything close to what you paraphrased. I didn't say he shouldn't complain, I said he shouldn't JUST complain.

To use another repliers example, it'd be like if I had already implimented (for example) file transfers in AIM, then tested a new open source AIM client and complained that file transfers didn't work right.

Please apply some critical reasoning before automatically replying to what you call an automatic reply.

Re:Re-invention of the wheel?

[clap_hands]

Go read the entire thread again. The first post asked for an evaluation of Wiktionary ("what's wrong with them?"). The second post gave an answer ("it sure looks incomplete to me"). To evaluate a resource is a perfectly valid thing to do, and there is no obligation to fix problems if the evaluation is negative, even if you have the capability to fix them.

Remember the context of the thread; this isn't someone just randomly moaning about a free resource not being as good as they'd like; this is a response to a query as to whether this "Universal Free Dictionary" project is necessary given that we already have a Wiktionary.

why GPL?

[emkman]

Aren't there much better licenses for dictionaries than the GPL? Creative Commons comes to mind. What does the Guttenberg project use?

Re:why GPL?

[gustgr]

http://www.gutenberg.org/license

Re:why GPL?

[gustgr]

I agree with you. Though GPL can be used for any kind of work, it is best suited for works where is possible to identify a "source" and a "binary" (speaking in terms of software).

A good choice would be the GNU Free Documentation License if you ask me.

Re:why GPL?

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree with you. Though GPL can be used for any kind of work, it is best suited for works where is possible to identify a "source" and a "binary" (speaking in terms of software).

A good choice would be the GNU Free Documentation License if you ask me.

Using the GNU "Free" Documentation License is a bad idea.

Will it ...

[coreprime]

support Klingon language? I never could understand it.Google has Klingon language but cant translate it.

Current limitations

[calibanDNS]

This sounds like an interesting prospect. However, according to the site, they seem to have a few limitations. For example:

example table with English backbone descriptions will not allow adding of words which cannot be translated with one English word

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?

Re:Current limitations

[paugq]

"Blue jeans" translated as "bluyins" into Spanish? As a native Spanish and Catalan speaker, I can only say: what a shit of a translation!.

"Blue jeans" = "vaqueros" ("pantalones vaqueros").

Re:Current limitations

[calibanDNS]

Oh, everyone in the class knew that teacher was on crack. I don't trust a word of vocab that I got from her in two years worth of classes. The summer after I graduated, I managed to spend about a week and a half in Spain, and got someone to tell me what they called blue jeans, but I was too drunk to remember it at the time. Thanks for clearing that up for me!

Re:Current limitations

[Azul]

If you go to the Diccionario de la Real Academia Española de la Lengua and lookup "bluyin", you'll get a "No such word in the dictionary".

However, people from certain countries do use "bluyin" often (actually, most of us colombians call "blue jeans" "blue jeans", as in "me compre unos nuevos blue jeans", which should probably be written as "bluyins"). I remember reading that the Real Academia Española, the main authority was considering adding the word to the dictionary.

Similar things have happened with some words. For example, the word "cruasán" was recently added to the dictionary for the french word "croissant", very commonly used in spanish-speaking countries.

Alejo

Re:Current limitations

[goldfndr]

example table with English backbone descriptions will not allow adding of words which cannot be translated with one English word

While you have this set in <blockquote>, it is far from a direct quote ("There will be always the backbone description which binds English word to only one meaning in Wordnet." - poor English, ought to be either "an English word" or "English words"), and doesn't match reality (words).

If you search for "cat" (their example) in the English <> French dictionary, one of examples is

catarrh chasing # contre le rhume

both of which are more than one word, so "blue jeans" certainly should be possible.

Re:Current limitations

[mvdw]

About your sig: I want a free iPod Photo.

Here ya go. You're welcome.

Re:Current limitations

[minairia]

"Bluyins" is a real word. Just go to google and type in "bluyins" and a whole bunch of Spanish pages come up all about blue jeans, some with the translation to English as "blue jeans". Nothing comes up in images, so maybe the word isn't universal, but lots of text only pages with it do exist.

Re:Current limitations

[Justarius]

As a spanish speaker, yes I agree that the grandparent's teacher was on crack, but that's not the exact translation in the rest of Latin America. Actually, "bluyins" (as far as the pronounciation goes) is pretty correct. The word is an english word that, by far at least in Central America, Mexico and most of South America that I know of, simply try to localise the word by it's pronounciation, not the literal translation.

Re:Current limitations

[dubl-u]

Actually, "bluyins" (as far as the pronounciation goes) is pretty correct.

Yeah, this is common enough to be mentioned in this fun article about languages borrowing words from English.

Re:Current limitations

[DarkGreenNight]

We also call them "Tejanos" o "Pantalones tejanos". Yep, that'd be like "Texans" or "Texan trousers".

But probably "buyins" is used (as another poster pointed) in the spanish speaking parts of America (the continent). Just like they get other words from English.

Re:Current limitations

[calibanDNS]

That's not an iPod Photo

Re:Current limitations

[Pxtl]

This reflects a fundamental difference between English and Spanish - in Spanish, spelling is inextricably tied to pronounciation, so when a new word is imported into the language its spelling is revised to match its pronounciation. In English, the word is simply written as is (if possible), and then its pronouncation is perverted gradually with time.

Re:Current limitations

[dfiguero]

And that depends on your locale! In Mexico it wouldn't translate to "vaqueros".

In Mexico

"Vaqueros" = "Cowboys"
"Blue jeans" = "Pantalones de mezclilla azul"

Re:Current limitations

[Secrity]

According to http://barrapunto.com/article.pl?sid=03/01/11/0729 244/ "bluyins" will be added to a dictionary.

Dentro de poco, podremos decir 'me he comprado unos bluyins' para expresar 'unos blue jeans (pantalones vaqueros)'. Esto es lo que se desprende de esta noticia de un periódico vasco. La Real Academia de la Lengua está preparando un Diccionario Panhispánico de Dudas con nuevas acepciones ortográficas de varios términos habituales en el idioma español.

Re:Current limitations

[SnapShot]

This is a interesting problem for the international dictionary. Which spanish (or english or portugese or whatever) gets the "definitive" mapped word and which ones are the special cases? Do you place Brazillian Portugese in a seperate column from European Portugeze or do you put all the differenct versions of words in the same database row?

It seems that the example scheme is a little simplistic to map to the real world but maybe that is by design?

Re:Current limitations

[mvdw]

Oh, yes it is. It's an iPod Photo. I think what the GP wanted though was a Photo iPod, which is something completely different...

Re:Current limitations

[calibanDNS]

According to the Apple site, it's called an iPod Photo, NOT a Photo iPod. Seeing as how they make the thing, I'm going to take their word for it.

Re:Current limitations

[ACPosterChild]

It looks to me as if an American heard a native Spanish speaker quickly pronounce the English words "blue jeans", wrote down how he thought this mysterious foreign word should be spelled, and then asked the Spanish speaker what it meant. The fact that an official body is thinking of adopting the word sounds kind of... insulting. But, if people are actually using it (rather than saying "blue jeans" with a heavy accent), then I guess it's the thing to do.

phonetic transcriptions

[zobier]

Why don't more people put syllable boundary markers in their phonetic transcriptions?

The flaw

[lifebouy]

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.

Re:The flaw

[calibanDNS]

Oh, sure, it's easy to use english

No, no it isn't.

Re:The flaw

[snarkh]

Esperanto - the language nobody speaks and nobody reads. What a great alternative to English!

Re:The flaw

[Sebastian Jansson]

English hard to learn? Not in my experience.
I think background have more to do with it, since I natively speak a somewhat related language I guess I have an advantage to i.e. a russian.

Re:The flaw

[lifebouy]

Yeah, yeah. Of course I have heard that before. On the other hand, I also keep correspondance with people from around the world, meet with local esperantists for coffee or dinner at least weekly, read magazines and books in esperanto, and listen to esperanto radio(music and talk shows) fairly often. So the several million speakers of esperanto and I tend to disagree with you. Your opinion, while I agree with your right to have it, is uninformed.

Re:The flaw

[snarkh]

Well, you have to agree that the number of speakers of esperanto is miniscule compared to the number of speakers of English.

Re:The flaw

[NeoSkandranon]

"several million" in a world population of 6.4 billion or thereabouts is a fairly distinct minority. Shouldnt the material be in a format more people can understand?

Re:The flaw

[bm17]

Screw that. I'm sick of people whining about English being hard. Our nouns have no gender. You don't have to memorize whether any given word is masculine or feminine (or neutral vs common, or whatever). You don't have to change the adjectives to fit the gender and plurality of the noun. Conjugation is simple; just add an 's' to the third person singular. Sure there are exceptions and 'strong' verbs, but that is true an any language.

I suspect that the reason people complain about english is because they are forced to learn it as a second language because, well, we won. Or because they are simply parroting what they've heard from others. Want to learn a difficult language? Try Finnish, or Islandic.

Re:The flaw

[rleibman]

vi tute pravas

Re:The flaw

[lifebouy]

Ok, point conceded.
That does not make English better, only more popular. In comparison, was Bush a better candidate than McCain? No(far from it!), only better funded. I try to promote Esperanto because I believe in it's purpose- to be a politically neutral language that's easy to learn which can be used for a common language for the world. Esperanto is so easy, it takes very little time to learn. It doesn't stomp out the very valuable native cultures of the world, it co-exists with them. English is a stomper. Don't agree? What languages have been spoken here in the U.S.? German, Spanish, French, various Native American languages, Italian, and several others. English has stomped them all into oblivion, mainly because it's so damn hard to learn, by the time you learn it as your native language, your brain is fried toward learning another. That's not just here. How many languages does the average (UK) Englishman speak? One? Hmmm, am I detecting a pattern?
Even if you could force the rest of the world to learn English, you shouldn't. It's terribly destructive to culture. Ask a non-American where the most un-cultured country in the world is. Any non-American. Go ahead. I'll wait.
The proof is in the pudding. English is bad. It's hard to learn and destructive to culture. It sounds awful. Even Klingon sounds more beautiful. And this is a native English speaker saying this.


By the way, slashdot coders, your italics code seems broken.

Re:The flaw

[bm17]

I never said I wasn't lazy. And I never called anyone stupid. I called them whiners. I've studied many languages. Learning a few exceptions for the reletively small number of usefull verbs doesn't compare to the huge number of gender cases one has to memorize with other languages. Learning any other language is hard. People complain about English so much because it is by far the most common second language.

This argument is pretty pointless unless we decide whether we are talking about spoken English or writen English.

Re:The flaw

[syrion]

Buh... what? The reason German, Spanish, Italian and French aren't spoken here--and they are, in small enclaves--is that the British, you know, won the wars and bought the land. Then America beat the British, but remained firmly a postcolonial nation. We began as Britons and thus our country uses English as its language. The death of the Native American languages is an uglier story, but has little to do with English and a lot to do with disease and campaigns of murder.

The reason so few Americans speak foreign languages is not English, either. It's because our country is huge. If every state spoke a different language, we'd learn several languages in order to communicate. All the states use English, though, so we use English. As an example, there are more bilingual people in the American Southwest and Louisiana than in the Southeast. Why? Because there are significant minority populations which speak other languages in those areas--Spanish and French, specifically.

Regarding culture... well. Popular culture is an atrocity, but don't blame that on English, either. Shakespeare wrote in English. So did Dickens, Nabokov, Faulkner, Joyce, Bradbury, Orwell, O'Connor, and so on. You could list authors forever. They've certainly done English proud, and, in fact, they usually lose something in translation.

Please--before you knock English as a language, know what you're talking about.

Re:The flaw

[NitroWolf]

No mod points :( Someone needs to mod the parent of this reply up.

Re:The flaw

[bm17]

The gender has nothing to do with the inherent gender of the object (cat). It's simply a way to make the phonemes flow gracefully. In English you could simply have said "Bring me the black" as well. Of what use is it to specify the gender of a pencil? La lapiz? El lapiz? How many hours do I have to spend memorizing the gender of every stupid word. Please.

And the plural is specified in the noun with a simple 's'. Except when you are using words from other languages, like latin. But you don't have to modify every adjective to reflect the gender and plurality. That's redundant.

Or perhaps I misunderstand you?

Re:The flaw

[syrion]

Dickens, Nabokov, Faulkner, Joyce, Bradbury, Orwell, and O'Connor wrote in modern English. They're all 19th and 20th Century authors.

Re:The flaw

[CRCulver]

Esperanto would be a good choice. Each word has basically one meaning.

This assertion is totally untrue. Look at Plena Ilustrita Vortaro or Reta Vortaro and see how many hundreds or thousands of words have variant meanings. The word "radio" has six meanings in RV alone and who knows how many in PIV. And then you've got minimal pairs which confuse many speakers, such as akcento/acxento. Esperanto is not some magical language without ambiguity.

It has few grammar exceptions.

The grammar of Esperanto is just as convoluted as other languages. Look at the size of Warenghien's and Wennergren's Esperanto grammars, and occasionally new problems arise which they haven't considered yet.

Lots of translations into esperanto end up being more accurate than translations into other languages for multiple reasons.

Can you link to some neutral studies?

Re:The flaw

[CRCulver]

It doesn't stomp out the very valuable native cultures of the world, it co-exists with them

No it doesn't. Try speaking any language besides Esperanto among Esperantists and see how quickly they complain. The hostility against learning and practising real languages in a fruitful and convenient international setting is what has driven me away from Esperanto. When I meet with, for example, Hungarian Esperantists, I would prefer to speak Hungarian with them, since I am already relatively proficient and further practise is always desirable. Esperanto should only be relied upon as a last result. But no, Esperantists insist on using only a single language, with no alternatives.

Furthermore, the idea that Esperanto is meant to "protect" minority language is a relatively recent sentiment, appearing in full force only with the Prague Manifesto of 1996. Before that Esperanto was, in the view of many, meant to supersede all national languages. Read the complete works of Zamenhof and see how often he espouses the hope that in the next several hundred years all people will have only a single language.

Re:The flaw

[bm17]

Soy/eres/es/etc.. How is that any simpler?

That's the number one most common verb. It's not a very good example. I appreciate the simplicity of Esperanto grammer, but the inventor screwed it up with gender.

Re:The flaw

[CRCulver]

Many Indians, at least the ones who have access to computing and international communication, already have some measure of English education. India was a British colony, remember? Much of the upper-middle class speaks English in the home. The Chinese are learning English at a tremendously fast rate. The ESL industry is booming there.

Re:The flaw

[bm17]

"Bring me the black" would be differant from "Bring me the blacks" in English. Normally I would say "Bring me the black one", just to be clear. On the other hand, for less familiar topics, English seems much more concise. Whenever I see multiple translations (on an airplane, for instance), the English always seems so be the shortest. In canada, the French translation usually seems about 33% longer. And the Inuktituk seems twice as long as that. For simple concepts, Spanish is concise, but for anything more modern or technilogical you need many more words than english.

I see your point about "negras" meaning female and many, but how often is it important to specify an object's sex?

My main point is that there are learning burdens on any language. English has exceptions in its verbs, but I think people often overlook the fact that in other languages you need to memorize a gender with each noun. Learning a single word for each noun is one thing, but learning two words is much harder, from an organizational point of view.

Re:The flaw

[safepage]

...quite right, English will never catch on (irony for English speaking US /.ers).

Re:The flaw

[Jakosa]

That English should be a severe screwed up language as opposed to Esperanto is rubbish. But it is true that English is not neutral.

Every language even the synthetic or the dead ones (Esperanto, Latin) has words that could be translated into multiple other words in other languages. A word like cat used in the example normally only has one meaning and is therefore good to showcase. But what about a word like the French "ennui". I am from Denmark and in my dictionary i get the following words: bekymring, bryderi, ærgelse; kedsomhed, kedsommelighed; lede (which about translates to: worry, trouble, vexation; Boredom, tedium; disgust)

I have great difficulty to see that you could make a really good database based on one table. The following quote from the project webpage illustrates just one problem

People from sci.lang google group have already discovered possible problems of this concept. For example table with English backbone descriptions will not allow adding of words which cannot be translated with one English word. There will be more tables. One English backbone descriptions > all languages and one for other direction. The new concept will also allow translating of thematic groups of words.

I can see the good things about using a backbone language, a fast database, easy maintenance etc. But to create a real dictionary you will have to design a more complex relational database. The drawback are of course the search time, that you will have to create more tools to oversee and maintain the project etc. but in the end wouldn't it be worthwhile?

None the less.. I am looking forward to see what this evolves into. If a global free database could be founded it would be a great step forward. I can't wait to have my Slashdot misspellings corrected by a plug-in in my browser..

Re:The flaw

[Jakosa]

If you really think that you won something because English is the preferred international language, why are you participating in a discussion about a dictionary? You wont need it anyway. Keep on using your winning language on finnish and icelandic newsboards where people are cultured enough to know more than one language and will be able to answer you in your native tongue.

Still, they might need an online dictionary that is not based on English as backbone language, so they will be able to express themselves clearly in English./p

Re:The flaw

[vidarh]

You miss the point entirely. While I don't know enough about Esperanto to discuss the merits of using it as an intermediate language, the point was that English certainly is NOT suitable if you want to be able to translate between arbitrary languages via an intermediate language - it is simply far too ambiguous.

Personally I doubt that ANY language would be suitable for the task - I don't think you'll be able to do anything resembling correct mappings via a third language without adding a lot of additional information.

Re:The flaw

[fatphil]

"Spanish ... English has stomped them all into oblivion"

Then why is Spanish a faster-growing language in the US than English is?

FP.

Re:The flaw

[TrixX]

If you follow the second link on the article, you'll se that they plan to use meanings and not words as translation keys. Meanings are taken from wordnet.

Re:The flaw

[KoolyM]

Esperanto, while an amusing intellectual excercise, is just as flawed a base language as English is. The reason is that it combines syntactical constructs and vocabulary elements from a (limited!) number of Indo-European languages only. This makes it easy to learn for speakers of English, French, Greek or Polish, but for a native speaker of Chinese (for instance) it's just as alien and strange as German or Russian.

Re:The flaw

[Gone Jackal]

A few thoughts.

Neither the syntax of English (or for that matter of any other included language) nor the morphology have much to do with the problem. The citation form is fixed by convention, and this is what counts. Note that the dictionary includes morphological expansions (plural, etc.) in the base search. This is the problem inherent in any dictionary: you have to know what you're looking for in order to find it, and one you'll have no matter what language you choose as a base.

The much greater problem is that the structure is based on a correlation word(language X)=word(language Y), without (at least after a quick sample of a few words) lexical subgroupings, phrase expansions, or context citations.

A basic part of any definition is a hierarchy of meanings. A cell can designate, among other things, an enclosed space in general, a biological term, or a battery (not to mention an abbreviation for a cellular telephone). The last two can be derived from the first in English, but may have completely different designations in other languages. Similarly produce "to create" and produce "fruits and vegetables". All definitions are spit back in a random list. It might be worthwhile, using English as a base, to correlate meaning, and not simply words. (Does remind me of the old joke: "Any Arabic word has four basic meanings: A definition, its exact opposite, something to do with the naughty bits, and something to do with a camel.")

Lastly, how are they coming up with their definitions? Most (good) dictionaries base them on context. I need to know why "shoot" has such a wide range of meanings, whether I "shoot a rifle", "shoot an intruder", "shoot hoops", or "shoot the shit", and I need to know in which context I can apply each. I need to know what arguments a word can take, whether I can date a document to a time-period or whether the document dates from that time. A random correlated list provides me with none of these things. There are more problems (free composites like the bizarre English ability to tack nouns together as a specification of the second element, e.g. "computer chip", which should rightly be a lexical item of its own, and not subsumed under "chip", etc.)

A dictionary, rightly done, is more than a laundry list of words and definitions. It should contain a subtle record of cultural context, language history, and usage. In other words, nice idea, but I'll still stick to the OED and company.

Re:The flaw

[Eravau]

Equating "cultured" and "multilingual" is laughable. If you're European you know several languages because you need to know them.

Many of the EU countries are about the size of a U.S. state. So you travel between countries like we travel between states. And when you do, you need to know a new language to communicate there.

We don't need to know a different language every time we travel a couple hundred miles from home. And so most don't.

If all of Europe spoke the same language, I'm betting most Europeans would be monolingual as well. The environment causes the multilingual effect...not some great "culture".

--Eravau (a bi-lingual American)

Re:The flaw

[Eravau]

As a follow up to my previous post, I do agree with your point (I believe it's your point) that people need dictionaries in their native language in order to express themselves more clearly in their secondary languages.

But (and here I'll diverge from your view)...if you can only publish it in one language...use a language that is widely used internationally. I think that English fits that mold fairly well.

Re:The flaw

[RealAlaskan]

How many languages does the average (UK) Englishman speak? One?

I don't know about what languages Englishmen learn nowadays (used to be English, Latin and French, in that order), but I have learned a language which will let me get by almost anywhere in the world. Where ever I travel, I can expect to meet someone, eventually, who will speak this language I've learned, even if he's in the next village over.

It's the most common second language in the world, learned by everyone who hopes to participate in trade, travel, government or science. It's the basis for many of the world's creoles, jargons and pidgins. It's become the language of science, surpassing Latin and German. It's become the language of opportunity. On the Indian subcontinent, it has surpassed Gudjerati as the language of trade. In the Far East, in the Middle East, in Europe and in the Americas, it's the language that every parent wants his child to learn. It's English.

If your first language is everybody's second language, do you really need another?

Re:The flaw

[NeoSkandranon]

If one doesn't understand the language the dictionary is written in, its precision and clearness is irrelevant. I sincerely doubt that many people are going to learn a language they may have never heard of before simply to use a dictionary.

Re:The flaw

[NeoSkandranon]

Please point out where i said that. Wait, you can't, cause i didn't.

Re:The flaw

[sluggo5]

Esperanto is pretty cool. But you're not going to create any new "samideanoj" by saying silly things like "English is... hard to learn and destructive to culture." That's not what the Esperanto ideal is all about.

Re:The flaw

[Jakosa]

Europeans don't need to be multilingual. They only need to speak English to get along. Knowing more languages than English and their native tongue would be called well educated.

When I used the term cultured it was because of the irritating ethnocentric view of the parent post. I am not equating cultered and multilingual. I am equating cultered and sad hick. If everybody was thinking the same way, nobody would be able to talk to each other. I have nothing against English as an international language but English haven't won anything. Its simply the result of British colonial politics and some other occurrences in world history. We could be writing in French or in Spanish now for my sake (if only I was more fluent in those languages, of course.. :) )

Re:The flaw

[Reziac]

That's because Esperanto is a religion first, a language second. Like all artificial constructs, it doesn't care what's already evolved to a functional state, only about imposing its own state.

English has already evolved into the modern lingua franca; there's no real point in forcing people to learn yet another language if they wish to communicate outside of their mother tongue.

And Latin would be a better choice, if the world still needed a cross-cultural language; despite its reputation, it's a logically-constructed language that can take a lot of abuse and still be understandable.

In fact, I think that's why English overtook French (the previous "most international" language). As Slashdot amply demonstrates, English can be hacked and mangled every which way, yet average folk, even those whose first language is NOT English, can still extract the sense of what someone is saying or writing. English is *very* forgiving of user error, and can readily deal with "unknown input".

(Even if some grammar and spelling Nazis aren't, and can't. ;)

Re:The flaw

[Reziac]

Witness that English can be mangled every which way and still be tolerably understandable, even among ESL persons of completely different native tongues. You don't HAVE to get English *right* to make yourself understood, just "close enough". You can mix tenses and cases without destroying meaning, and use all sorts of wrong words and weird misspellings, yet nearly everyone will get what you meant. (Witness slashdot :)

Whereas if you merely get the gender wrong in some languages, you may have said something contrary to what you meant, or even a mortal insult. In tonal languages, you've got yet another layer of complication in that your ear and voice have to be good enough to distinguish what was meant.

BTW my high school Latin teacher told us that idiomatic spoken Latin was much like English, in that it used simpler structures than what we were learning as classical written Latin. Much as when modern folk talk face to face, they don't bother using using precise grammar.

Re:The flaw

[CRCulver]

[Latin]'s a logically-constructed language

Latin is not a "logically-constructed" language, for no human language is. Take a course in Latin composition and you'll see how many bizarre, inexplicable idioms it has. I am in one this semester (I study comparative linguistics), and I am fed up with idiomatic expressions like gerundives, uses of the subjunctive in indirect discourse, etc.

I think that's why English overtook French

No it isn't. English overtook French due to geopolitical reasons, not because English has some superiority. Linguistics shows that no language is superior to any another. I would recommend reading Bauer and Trudgill's Language Myths . And you seem to think French is not flexible and evolving. While it does have an Academy which serves to regulate some official language, the authentic language of the Francophone world is just as vibrant as English or any other. Listen to African French and tell me that French can't be hacked without being understood.

Re:The flaw

[CRCulver]

But you're not going to create any new "samideanoj" by saying silly things like "English is... hard to learn and destructive to culture." That's not what the Esperanto ideal is all about.

You haven't been paying much attention to the international movement, then. World Esperanto-Association, as well as many national organisations, has spent the last ten years calling English difficult and destructive. The bulk of its activity within UNESCO, the EU, and the Council of Europe is saying exactly that.

Re:The flaw

[Vintermann]

"_Our_ nouns have no gender"

You are a native english speaker, apparently. This is only guessing from statistics, but if you are a typical british or american then you probably don't speak any other languages either.
In any case, you aren't qualified to speak about how difficult it is to learn english.
You are qualified to talk about how hard it is to learn finnish or icelandic, however. But all languages are hard, much harder than people generally think. Those "learn russian in twenty lessons" audiotapes they sell are just about as credible as the average herbal viagra.

(Icelandic shouldn't be so hard for english speakers to learn, though, relatively speaking. It's quite related to english, okay, it has four cases, but so has german.)

The issues you speak of in english aren't the hard parts, the exceptions are the hard parts, and english has loads of them. And you have to know the etymology of the word in order to pronounce it...

Seriously, there are chinese professors in english who can't hold a regular conversation with an american. You could prefer to believe that they are stupid, but I rather doubt it.

Re:The flaw

[Vintermann]

"Can you link to some neutral studies?"

Esperanto is such a narrow and politicized subject that any study even mentioning it could be described as non-neutral.

It wouldn't be all that hard to carry out a small informal experiment yourself. English-speaking esperantists are everywhere. Find one (preferrably someone with a couple of year's worth of experience) , ask him to translate a sample text of your composition, with emphasis on accuracy as opposed to style.

Find another, and ask him to do the reverse.

Post the results on your weblog, get famous ;-D

Any descriptive grammar of a living language will be complex. Esperanto's normative grammar is quite small. (Even the descriptive grammars are tiny compared to the english ones, btw.)

Radio has the same six meanings in NPIV, I suspect, without having it in front of me. It doesn't really compare to the english "set", or to any natural language where they don't consciously set out to avoid ambiguities.

Re:The flaw

[bm17]

As it happens, I've studied Spanish, Swedish, French, and German. I am as qualified to defend English as the people who attack it. They already went through the trouble of learning their own language's gender system when they were two years old so they overlook the time savings that happens when they learn English nouns. They focus on the things they have trouble with. As you say, any language is hard to learn. (Icelandic, a germanic lauguage, has 24 main declensions, by the way).

I'm not saying that anyone is stupid. I don't know where you got that from. America seems to be an easy target for casting aspersions upon.

Re:The flaw

[sluggo5]

To say I haven't been paying much attention to the international movement would be an exaggeration: I admit, I haven't been paying any attention to it. But just because the World Esperanto Association has taken that counterproductive and truculent stance doesn't make it the right stance to take. Esperanto, like AA, ought to be "a program of attraction rather than promotion," in my opinion. Attacking English will only reinforce the average person's impression of Esperanto as a toy for dreamy peaceniks and cranks, when the reality is that Esperanto could be very useful as an international lingua franca.

Re:The flaw

[Vintermann]

I've studied english and german in school, but I only speak english to any significant degree. But what I meant was that I, who am norwegian, can read icelandic with just a little trouble (but I can't understand it when spoken). If we try to learn icelandic by moving there, I think both of us should manage pretty well after a year or two. When we wouldn't necessarily do that in Finland or Taiwan, it hasn't so much to do with the complexities of their languages as their sheer alienness, from our point of view.

I didn't mean to cast aspersions on America, not even the english language. (Americans seem to be touchy about this since the iraq invasion). I'm just saying that cases and grammatical gender are what would be difficult for you, since your native tounge doesn't have many of them (same with me, by the way. That's why my german is so bad).

For a year I went to a school where a lot of foreigners learned norwegian, alongside norwegians learning other things. The two americans switched entirely to norwegian in three months, and by the end of the year they rolled their R's and got tones right (norwegian has two, fortunately for learners they're not that important). Of the four chinese students, two of them managed to attain a very broken norwegian, hard to understand even for a native tolerant of a lot of mistakes. The other two weren't able to communicate in norwegian at all, and hardly understood it either. And they did try very hard.

Those were the extremes. Most of the students fell somewhere in between, although it seemed that those who knew many languages before picked up norwegian more easily.

Re:The flaw

[bm17]

Yeah, we're sensitive. There are so many bad things about America that it's hard to see the not-so-bad things attacked as well.

Over the past few day I have come to see that there are many exceptions in english spelling. I was originally thinging about the spoken language when I brought ('brought'? how the hell do you spell that?) this subject up.

I am suprised that no one has pointed out that English does have noun gender: "the" and "the" are pronounced differently depending on the begining phoneme of the word that follows.

So we agree more than I thought, which is funny because my nickname used to be 'winterman' due to my always wearing a heavy jacket, even in the summertime. Hey, I like pockets.

So how about combination analysis?

[sempf]

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.

Re:So how about combination analysis?

[snarkh]

Are you sure it is not 165,000 years of human history?

Re:So how about combination analysis?

[Ricwot]

6,000?

Re:So how about combination analysis?

[snarkh]

As far as language before writing is concerned any number seems as good as any other.

Re:So how about combination analysis?

[AhtirTano]

Obviously, since that should be IANAL

IAAL (I am a linguist). Lots of people have started using the abbreviation IMNAx as an acronym for "I'm not a x". No "A" in the contraction, so no "A" in the acronym.

Re:So how about combination analysis?

[fatphil]

YAACL.

IANAx is an acronym for "I am not a x".
They may also use "I'm not a x" as a contraction of "I am not a x", but that doesn't mean that suddenly mean that IANAx is no longer an acronym of the base phrase.

FP.

Re:So how about combination analysis?

[pipingguy]

Nor cunning.

Now

[RealProgrammer]

All your noun are belong to us!

Re:Now

[tarunthegreat2]

In Soviet Russia, the Dictionary looks up YOU!

Re:Now

[RealProgrammer]

In Korea, only old people use online dictionaries, you insensitive clod!

Re:Now

[AlXtreme]

I for one welcome our new free online dictionary overlords!

aththay ouldshay ebay..

[Suchetha]

igpay atinlay ouyay (how the uckfay do you write 'insensitive') odclay

Suchetha

Re:aththay ouldshay ebay..

[HiggsBison]

igpay atinlay ouyay (how the uckfay do you write 'insensitive') odclay

insensitiveway

if a word begins with a vowel, just stick a 'way' on the end.

(uhday)

Re:aththay ouldshay ebay..

[geminidomino]

insensitiveway. (Pig latin isn't great code for words staring with a vowel)

how to handle slang?

[radarsat1]

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.

Re:how to handle slang?

[Phidoux]

And if you have more than one car? Does it become char[n]?

Re:how to handle slang?

[shoolz]

Very interesting concept! Could it ever work for the variances in the thousands of human languages?

Funny story: My Iranian uncle (by marriage - not blood) had just immigrated to Canada, and was caught in a motor vehicle violation (running a stop sign) and repeatedly shouted at the police officer "I ate shit! I ate shit!", which is actually Persian slang for "Boy is my face red. I admit I made a mistake and I ask your forgiveness".

True story. I wish I could remember the Persian phrase right now...

(He got out of the ticket because the officer was laughing so hard)

Re:how to handle slang?

[chris_mahan]

well, I think that would be "J'vais prenez les varchar".

Of course, then, it's hard to see how he's going to takemore than one car... maybe this is why this is overused.

Re:how to handle slang?

[mutterer]

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.

Not only is it not *good* french, it's not even *french*. "Prenez" is the 2nd person plural/formal present indicative form of "prendre," so it means "you take/are taking."

I'm not québécois, but I'm guessing what you meant was "j'vais prendre le char ce soir," or maybe "je vais prendre le char ce soir."

Re:how to handle slang?

[fatphil]

I go you take the car this evening?

???

Going should take the infinitive, not the 2nd person singular.
It's certainly not good French - it's barely French at all.

FP.

Re:how to handle slang?

[Uggy]

Haha. Funny coincidence. In Puerto Rico, running a stop sign is, "Comerse un pare" "to eat a stop [sign]." That's too funny.

Interestingly enough, this whole eating similarity goes to illuminate that similarities of taste metaphors. In Puerto Rico, everything is related to taste, both good and bad. Language is a reflection of culture and is shaped by it. Of course it is a reciprocal relationship, but IMHO language is most strongly a reflection on the values of the people. Puerto Rico = taste. Everything is related to it, women, experience, actions, beauty, etc.

Re:how to handle slang?

[denis-The-menace]

It would be: "j'vais prendre les chars ce soir", i'm going to take the cars tonight.
BTW: The "s" at the of "chars" would be silent in this case.

Re:how to handle slang?

[CrosseyedPainless]

The first MySQL joke I've ever seen! You win.

Re:how to handle slang?

[infinite9]

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.


I was reading an article about mistranslations into english on signs in european countries. My favorite one was in a swiss ski resort hotel (or was it austrian?) Anyway, what they were trying to say was something like "please don't walk around in the hallways wearing ski boot at night while people are sleeping." What the sign said was, "Please do not perambulate in the corridors in the hours of repose in the boots of ascention."

Re:how to handle slang?

[NorthDude]

Yes, I am a french speaking canadian from Montréal and we would say "j'vais prendre le char ce soir". "J'vais" is just a diminutive for "je vais", just like "I'm" is a diminutive for "I am".

Re:how to handle slang?

[Reziac]

That sort of thing happens (translated or not) whenever someone tries to be excessively formal, rather than just sticking to idiom.

Read some beginner fanfic, or anyone's first attempt at a scientific paper, and you'll see the same thing -- overuse of fancy formal language, to the point of being laughable.

I used to read a lot of ancient Greek stuff translated into English. The average translator didn't have a clue about idiom, so the results were painfully stiff, sometimes to the point of obscuring content. But there were a few who got that idiomatic language needs to remain idiomatic even in translation, and the result was that their translations were every bit as pleasant to read as if they'd been written in my native English to begin with.

Re:how to handle slang?

[Reziac]

That's what synonymies are for -- displaying the fine nuances between words. The old Funk and Wagnall's complete dictionary also contain synonymy entries -- very useful.

Of course, sometimes you do wind up realizing that the word that means exactly what you want, is one that average folk won't understand. Frex, "chary" is not quite the same as "wary", but how many people reading this know the difference without having to look it up?? (Hint: I learned the diff from my beloved synonymy.) Then the question becomes.. do you use the accurate word, or the word that more folk will understand? At that point, you have to know your audience.

Slang dictionaries are similarly useful, especially those that give examples in context.

(I collect every volume of both types that I can lay hands on... well, at reasonable prices, tho I did special-order my fave synonymy.)

Re:how to handle slang?

[Vintermann]

I don't think diminutive is the right word here, is it? Not if it's the same as a diminuative anyway...

Other links

[odano]

Free downloadable plain-text dictionaries

Re:The flaw or maybe not

[otisg]

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

GPL auto-corrections

[FunWithHeadlines]

"The universal dictionary will be soon available for free under GPL."

And for a convenience, it will automatically correct your spelling as follows:

• Linux --> GNU/Linux
• Microsoft --> Micro$oft
• Bill Gates --> Convicted monopolist
• Steve Ballmer --> Monkey-boy

Re:GPL auto-corrections

[AmberBlackCat]

Steve Ballmer --> Monkey-boy

This is the first time a slashdot post actually made me laugh.

Re:GPL auto-corrections

[Anonymous Coward]

And, it would insert the following phrases into your text at random times:
* Beowulf Cluster of those
* In Korea, only old people
* In Soviet Russia
* All you base
* Hit Grits
* I'd tell you more but my Gentoo OpenOffice install is still compiling....

Re:GPL auto-corrections

[FunWithHeadlines]

"This is the first time a slashdot post actually made me laugh."

Thank you for taking the time to tell me. That's what I was trying to do, and it's good to hear.

Phrase translation

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Phrase translation

[clsc]

And there's more to it than that. Some languages have more word states than others, eg. depending on past/present tense(s), singular/plural, and/or who you're talking to. Not to mention synonyms and words with more than one meaning depending on context.

And then there are words that shouldn't be translated - eg. in Danish, the common word for "Download" is "Download" even though it's English. You can translate "Download" of course ("Hent ned"), but nobody in Denmark use those Danish terms, so a translation wouldn't be right for that word as nobody would understand what you were talking about if you used the Danish words.

Re:Phrase translation

[owlstead]

Yup, and then it should say that the word is equal. If I put a text into babelfish it won't make a list of the words that are not translated. This is a bad thing, since I don't know if the word is not in the dictionary or if the word is the same in both languages. Which makes quite a bit of difference in everyday use.

In defense of babelfish, it is about making pages understandable for the user, and not the other way around. But for other translators it should be a must.

A New Kind of Flaming

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:A New Kind of Flaming

[chocolatetrumpet]

4. ???
5. Profit!

ahhh crap wrong joke...

Yeah, but will it translate...

[Greenspan]

What about that small African tribe that communicates by clacking their tongue? Will it translate that?

Translation

[Uukrul]

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

I looked election...

[Phidoux]

... and it said, "Something that happens to most Japanese men before sex"?!?!

Re:I looked election...

[Bearpaw]

I looked election ... and it said, "Something that happens to most Japanese men before sex"?!?!

Interesting. That's very close to usage in the US, where it means something that happens before everybody gets screwed.

There's more than this to a good dictionary

[belmolis]

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.

Re:There's more than this to a good dictionary

[Bill Walker]

If you'd like a good example of this, check out Whitaker's Words. It's a latin parser that does pretty much the morphological analysis you describe.

It's not perfect, principally because it doesn't have a convention to enter long vowels (the ones with a bar over them in latin), but it sure got me through High School latin.

That was back in '97 or so, and I see Mr.Whitaker is still updating the page, so maybe it's much better now. He was trying at one point to have the parsed latin translate directly into english; IIRC he was having more trouble constructing correct english than with decoding the latin.

Re:There's more than this to a good dictionary

[loquacious d]

Another interesting problem would be some pre/in/suffixive languages (like some of the Yupik family) where single words are constructed in much the same way whole sentences or clauses are formed in "normal" languages, and a single word can act as an entire sentence. (I forget the precise term, something-morphous--been too long since I took that course on Alaska Native languages.) Making a word-level dictionary for this sort language would be impossible.

This is great!

[tattoi.nobori]

Now, if I can just find someone to extract this stupid fish...

Question about dictionaries under GPL license

[kurisuto]

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?

Re:Question about dictionaries under GPL license

[DavidTC]

Um, what?

All public domain works are usabled with GPL works, or any copyright materials at all...that's the point of the public domain. There's no license on the planet that would, or even could, allow you to add material to a work, as long as it was not public domain, that makes no sense at all.

And you can always put a copyright work in the public domain if you have the copyright on it. It doesn't matter if you combine it with GPL stuff.

Re:Question about dictionaries under GPL license

[m50d]

No and no. The GPL does nothing to prevent you using gpled works with others, however any derived works must also be GPL. Technically you may need to license the public domain dictionary to yourself under the GPL before combining them, but that's no trouble.

Re:Question about dictionaries under GPL license

[Reziac]

Interesting project! I'll have to go look again when I have time.

As to GPL, I had the same thought -- words and their meanings are *by their very nature* in the public domain. So while the presentation method may rightfully be GPL'd, I can't see that the content should or even could be. That would be like GPL'ing English, or Latin. Say what??

As to made-up languages like Klingon and Esperanto... I'm not sure what the heck applies. Is Klingon under copyright??

Re:Question about dictionaries under GPL license

[Vintermann]

Yup, klingon is heavily restricted by copyright. They (the KLI that is) can't even publish dictionaries or grammars as those are official star trek accessories. They were initially sued for setting up a website at all.
The Lojban/Loglan split is also an example that you can't do whatever you like with a constructed language. Esperanto is in the clear, though. It would be public domain anyway even if Zamenhof hadn't disavowed all special rights to his creation, because it's over a hundred years old.

That said, you probably shouldn't copy word definitions verbatim from published Esperanto dictionaries unless you have verified that you are in the clear! Also, dictionaries whose copyright have expired will be slightly out of date on some words.

Re:Question about dictionaries under GPL license

[Reziac]

Ah yes, I'd forgotten about how Klingon is under the Paramount umbrella (I've reminded other folk about this re "who actually owns your fanfic" often enough... musta had a brain breeze).

Given the current IP climate, if you speak in a constructed language, someone else could wind up owning whatever you said! :(

[finds loglan site, eyes it from a safe distance] What the heck is THAT grown from? It looks vaguely like it wanted to be Spanish mixed with perhaps ... Czech?? Not my idea of an easily learned language. Never heard of it before, nor this infamous split -- wha'happened??

Re:Question about dictionaries under GPL license

[Vintermann]

Some linguistics professor in the fifties wanted to experiment with some hypothesis that languages can restrict or enhance certain ways of thinking, so he made a language with a grammar based on predicate logic. It quite caught the public's imagination at the time, I even think Martin Gardner mentioned it in his column in Scientific American. Despite the publicity however, as with all new constructed languages, very, very few tried to learn it, even of those professing interest in the language. Those who did ran into trouble with the creator, I don't know exactly what kind, but apparently he tried to assert some power over the language that the few speakers didn't think he should have. As a result Lojban was created. It's based on exactly the same principles as Loglan, but has a different dictionary, AFAIK, since that was copyrighted. The original author sued to prevent them from using the Loglan name, but he failed.

No more than a handful of people speak either language, and I have grave doubt about their fluency.

Not my idea of an easily learned language either. I don't think we are made to think everyday thoughs in predicate logic. It's sort of interesting, though. I might have learned it if I were immortal and bored ;-) As it is, esperanto is more than demanding enough.

Re:Question about dictionaries under GPL license

[Reziac]

Yep... you'd think that 1) if his principles are correct (which I think to some extent they are, from what I've observed), and 2) if people were inclined toward predicate logic in the first place -- such a language would have naturally evolved without anyone's help!

As to the "problems", from what I saw on the description page and your comment, it reeks of control freakery and not a little of NewSpeak, so "issues" with the creator should have surprised no one!!

Re:The flaw or maybe not

[memco]

Doublethink is doubleplus good.

Re:The flaw or maybe not

[lifebouy]

Your funny note is very indicative. Wet Pant. If English were not my native tongue, Would this ring any chord? Would I think someone may have urinated themselves at that spot? Aside from the misspelling, how many meanings could you attach to the word pant? It's a noun, its a verb. It's what you do if you are a dog, it's what you wear while playing with that dog. It's the breath the dog exhaled. This is a standard word.
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.

The primary value of human languages is communication, so as long as you can speak it and communicate, this primary function is satisfied.

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.

ideal for classrooms

[dazz_j]

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.

Unheimlich

[Magickcat]

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)

Re:Unheimlich

[xlv]

the German unheimlich for instance. Even the French uncanny doesn't quite do it justice.

I think you mixed up your translations as uncanny isn't really a French word... From the German word, I get "énormément" in French and "terribly" in English based on Google's translating tools which in some contexts could mean the same thing. Sorry I don't really know German so I cannot understand the true meaning of unheimlich, I know I should have been paying attention to my third language classes back in France...

Re:Unheimlich

[Magickcat]

Ahh yes, you're right, sorry - uncanny originates as a Scottish word, not a French one.

Re:Unheimlich

[Wastl]

From the German word, I get [...] "terribly" in English based on Google's translating tools which in some contexts could mean the same thing.

I know German very well, and "unheimlich" has a certain nuance in it that is not at all reflected in "terrible". "Unheimlich" is much weaker, somewhat like a mixture of "uncomfortable" (that would be the 1:1 translation) and "terrible". For example, going through an empty quiet, abandoned place can be "unheimlich".

Regarding the universal dictionary, I think using English as a backbone is a bad choice because (in my opinion) English is a language with comparably few words (e.g. compared to German, French, and Swedish - the other languages I know). When I translate from German to Swedish or French via English, the outcome is usually complete nonsense. The only feasible way (if there is no direct translation German->Swedish available) is to manually lookup the German->English translation, interpret the English word according to the context and manually lookup relevant English->Swedish translations.

Backing the thing with WordNet is not sufficient to solve this problem, because WordNet reflects only relations between English words.

When I studied, we had a funny game having the university restaurant's online menu translated into English and back. From "Spagetthi", we got "Kabel", and so forth.

Sebastian

Re:Unheimlich

[psleonar]

Jo, det beror ju på vad man betyder när man säger 'de flesta orden' men enligt Oxford University Press har engelskan ganska många ord.

Re:Unheimlich

[vidarh]

I don't think English has few words, but it does in many areas have a relatively small "common" working vocabulary for most situations. That is, you'll be able to find an English word for most of your concepts, but many of them may not be commonly used and may be inappropriate to use in a translation outside specific contexts. You might find there are words that fit perfectly and would be suitable were you to write poetry or an epic novel, but that would make you sound like a pretentious twit if you used it in conversation, yet where the equivalent words in other languages are perfectly commonplace.

That's the case going to/from many languages, but if you're comparing it to Swedish, German or French, you run into the "complication" that English is a complete mish-mash of a Germanic base with about 40% of it's vocabulary coming from French. So many "English" words originating from both the Germanic languages and from French are still "there" in English but have fallen out of common use and aren't really suitable for a fairly generic translation.

The match between German and Swedish should be a lot more straightforward because the languages have evolved much closer alongside eachother.

Re:Unheimlich

[Magickcat]

English is my native tongue, but I prefer Latin when it comes to needing an exact and clear meaning. Latin is much more direct, unlike English which is full of amiguity and obsolete words.

English imports so many foreign words, and they all go in and out of fashion, and the strength of the words seem to change like clothing fashion. Latin on the other hand is direct and clear and quick - oh and the verbs are much more elegant in that they denote the possesor of the verb unlike English. Thinking in Latin makes the mind clear and direct I think.

Re:Unheimlich

[ownermachina]

The old bastard Freud actually devoted pages and pages to the translation of the word unheimlich. You can read a short summary here..

Fairly interesting, really. It means uncanny, unfamiliar, un-home-like, but it has several mixed meanings. This is the beauty of languages really, as you can evoke such richness of meanings with a single word...

This is the beauty of poetry too.

Re:Unheimlich

[minimunchkin]

'Unsettling', 'unnerving', 'eerie' - are any of these close?

Re:Unheimlich

[Idarubicin]

It's probably redundant in saying this, but many words have no English equivalent - the German unheimlich for instance.

I'm pretty sure it means "something that blocks one's windpipe and can't be removed through the application of abdominal thrusts."

Alternately, a good English translation might be "creepy", "disquieting", or "disconcerting". Obviously there is a certain dependence on context.

Re:Unheimlich

[Wiwi Jumbo]

Um... Isn't the reason that Latin is exact and clear the fact that it's a "dead" language?

I could be wrong (most likely actually..) but I thought the whole reason you have things like "scientific" names in Latin is that since it's dead it's unchanging and static. So that what's defined in Latin can't be misinterperted.

I'm not sure if Latin would still have that ability if it wasn't dead.

As for the elegance of Latin verbs, I'll have to leave that alone as I'm still trying to get this "English" thing down. More into "Newfunese" myself. :-)
http://www.buddywasisname.com/l_newfunese.htm

Re:Unheimlich

[RealAlaskan]

... many words have no English equivalent - the German unheimlich for instance.

Let's see: un means not, while heimlich comes from the Heimlich manuver, used to dislodge food from a choking person's throat.

Therefore, unheimlich means to choke a person by lodging (expecially by re-lodging) food in his throat.

Re:Unheimlich

[Magickcat]

It is a dead language, but it was used for a very long time, and for applied with a great deal of things, so it's very easy to say exactly what you mean often quicker than English, and much more clearly.

New words do get added to Latin however. Apparently there's a department at the Vatican that makes up terms. So for instance "Universal Resource Locator"(URL) is Universale Rerum Locatrumand "Internet" is Internetum.

Even common phrases translate well, so for instance: Ad eundum quo nemo ante iit is "To boldly go where no man has gone before".

Re:Unheimlich

[Magickcat]

hehehe - I looked it up and apparently "Henry Jay Heimlich" was the American inventor of the heimlich maneuver.

Re:Unheimlich

[Vintermann]

Can you translate "to boldly split infinitives no man has ever split before", however? :-)

Re:Unheimlich

[Magickcat]

Can you translate "to boldly split infinitives no man has ever split before", however? :-)

hehehe - that sounds much more difficult.

Re:The flaw or maybe not

[Anonymous Coward]

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?"

Universal dictionary?

[Nine Tenths of The W]

How's this going to work with language specific words and concepts like schaudenfraude?

Re:Universal dictionary?

[cagliost]

"Schadenfreude" is an English word!

Seriously, the dictionary would just include the words "schadenfreude" and "unheimlich", and give them definitions as if they were any other word.

Are you sure about that?

[goldfndr]

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.

Stupid mods, who marked this troll?

[Nine Tenths of The W]

Khoisan languages use click as part of pronounciation

In a related story...

[wasted]

...SCO sues the operators of GPL Dictionary for using words that were originally included in source code allegedly developed by SCO...

Where's Armenian?

[mOoZik]

You listed almost every language other than Armenian. Shame on you!

Step toward Babblefish

[Hao Wu]

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!

American Sign Language (AMSLAN?)

[buckhead_buddy]

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. :-)

Re:American Sign Language (AMSLAN?)

[Joe Tie.]

Just wanted to give you a quick thanks for even thinking about something like this. I've been wanting to learn American Sign Language for a while now, but wasn't able to find much on the internet. Even books have been a bit of a hit or miss thing that seems more often than not to fit in the miss catagory for my learning style.

Re:American Sign Language (AMSLAN?)

[EnglishDude]

Adding to what you've said, but for BSL, there's also some signs that is the same for different English words, or 2 signs for the same word - such as "fish" (referring to a live fish) and "fish" (referring to a dead fish that you eat) - for example "fish and chips" - I always sign "fish" using the live fish sign (I've been brought up with this one!) and some people who recently learnt sign normally laugh at that which annoys me.

Also sometimes there's signs for different words such as "pullover" "jumper" and "jersey" in BSL, the signs for those is the same.

Oh yeah as you know, there's quite a few signs that has no English equivalent! :)

I'm currently working on a project in which we are developing an online BSL Dictionary - and we are battling those problems you speak of, but we aren't solving the problems in a clever way - just entering a field where "This sign is used when you eat the fish, such as 'fish and chips'" and letting the hearies work it all out. Not enough time to do it properly ;) There's loads of ASL dictionaries out there but all of them are simple and relies on English word searches.

Good luck with your project and hopefully we'll see it soon :)

Why read the article?

[Scrameustache]

Why not just contribute to Wiktionary?

The table will be filled with triplets (for example corresponding english-german-french translations) from all existing free dictionaries.

Go ahead and contribute to the wiktionary.

What means FDicts?

[scarykitty]

Check out the bottom of the page. It really says "What means FDicts?" Measure once, check twice!

wow..lord of the dictionaries

[MasterOfUniverse]

One dictionary to rule them all!

!n k0r34

[Anonymous Coward]

1337 5P34K 1s F0r 0ld p3opl3

Re:!n k0r34

[DrSkwid]

Ah, but we old people know that the correct term is not "leet speak" but "chaos text"

now write a web-servcice & client for it..

[dwipal]

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.

All Languages....what?

[negative3]

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.

Re:All Languages....what?

[vidarh]

You're right. It'll be useless unless they map from each specific language to each target set, and they'll also require more than one target entry, and separate sets for each direction.

Here's an example. I chose it at random expecting to find a problem or two, but as you can see I could more or less go on and on for each iteration back and forth:

Norwegian "stein" can be translated to English at least as "stone" or "rock", however in English you will sometimes use "rock" to refer to a jewel for instance. That meaning would be lost on most Norwegian readers unless it's obvious from the context.

The right translation would instead be "juvel". Going the other direction again, "juvel" can be translated to "jewel" without many problems (except for the consideration of whether you want to use "gem" or "gemstone" instead). But if you want to translate "jewel" to Norwegian, you need to be aware that if you mean "jewel" as in a gem, you would translate it to "juvel", while if you mean "jewel" as in an ornament of precious metals or gems it would be more natural to translate it to "smykke".

Translating "smykke" back is more tricky, as in Norwegian that term encompass a much wider range of adornments than the English word "jewel", including chains, bracelets, ear-rings etc. that are not made of precious metals or gems or "lookalikes" - it could just as easily be wood, or natural stone or a variety of other materials.

In essence, their data structure seems fundamentally flawed, as it doesn't take into account the fact that MOST words map differently into MOST languages and have different mappings in both directions.

To do it properly, you need a many to many mapping from each word in each language to a set of target words in each language. Even if they restrict themselves from translating to/from English, they'd still have to expect a one to many mapping in from English to each target language, and a one to many mapping from each target language and back.

Re:All Languages....what?

[vidarh]

Just to reply to myself, their current online dictionaries actually does reflect this problem for exactly the words I chose... How they'll handle this with the new structure isn't clear to me since they seem to believe that their English "backbone" description will be sufficient to define a word.

Re:All Languages....what?

[fatphil]

One of the better multi-lingual automatic translators I've seen did actually use Esperanto as the backbone. Esperanto has a very limited vocabulary, and perhaps this works in its favour, as it was never a 1-1 word mapping, but a word->phrase mapping. In English, there's usually a word, sometimes several, that are "close enough", and one of those gets picked as being the translation, losing many nuances that could be carried if phrases were permitted.

I've not checked, but perhaps 'jewelry' is the word they're missing. Jewelry doesn't have to be made with jewels nowadays (e.g. wooden jewelry is not uncommon).

Phil

Dictionary != language textbook

[glasse]

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

Re:Dictionary != language textbook

[RealAlaskan]

Havng taken Chinese, you should know that even having a Latin-based script like Pin-Yin doesn't help you pronounce Chinese.

Re:Dictionary != language textbook

[glasse]

Definitely. Sometimes it hurts. That's why detailed pronounciation information and audio samples would be needed too. Ethan

Re:The flaw or maybe not

[buckhead_buddy]

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

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.

Free Dictionary!?

[miscellaneous_havoc]

Oh man, A free Dictionary under GPL! I'm there! No more long weekends Brute-Forcing my friend's email account anymore. Yippee!!

Re:The flaw or maybe not

[Simonetta]

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.

Needs to be said

[mapinguari]

I, for one, welcome our new linguistic overlords.

How about a grammer database

[DongleFondle]

"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.

FAQ

[gregmckone]

Why Q Entries in FAQ use Structured Differently English.

Are maintainers FAQ also architechts Backbone of English?

Am I Possible Detecting liability project here?

Online translators exist...

[WoTG]

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/

Bad translations

[wine]

Since I'm dutch and writing my thesis in english, I took a look at the dutch - english translation. The quality of the translations are bad.

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.

Re:Bad translations

[MrHanky]

'The' is a good example for the limitations of this sort of dictionary in general. It shows up in the Norwegian translation as well. We don't use a definite article in front of nouns, but concatenate it at the end, so that 'mann', which means 'man', becomes 'mannen' in definitive. Fdicts just translates words into other words, which severely distorts the usual meaning in this case. The list of Norwegian words for 'the' usually means 'them' 'they' 'that' or the type of 'the' you have in 'the more the merrier' -- one of two possible translations of the last kind can be translated back to some uses of the word 'yes'. And Norwegian, like Dutch, is pretty close to English.

This is just The Wrong Way to write a dictionary.

Good idea, however, some flaws I found

[Jugalator]

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.

Re:The flaw or maybe not

[golgotha007]

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.

Unheimlich = scary

[harmonica]

...would have been my immediate choice of translation. Ein unheimliches Schloß, a scary castle. Am I missing something?

Re:Unheimlich = scary

[Magickcat]

The problem is that the translation looses the actual subtle meaning of the word. you could tell an English speaker that the word translates to "scary" - but unheimlich has a finer meaning than just feeling fear.

Re:Unheimlich = scary

[harmonica]

Is that so? dict.leo.org came up with 'eerie' as a translation. May be even better. Anyway, there are words that cannot be properly translated, I agree with that.

Several translations

[zarkzervo]

The english word 'artist' translates into the norwegian words 'artist' which means rock artist or circus artist (a person that entertains) and the word 'kunstner' which means paint artist or sculptural artist (a person who makes art).

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

Babylon

[bhima]

Interesting, I wonder if it somehow could be used with Babylon Pro?

No Vietnamese...

[Mr. KFM]

Oh well, can't say I was actually depending on it to have it.

Would've been nice, though.

DICT

[Nexum]

Does anyone know if they plan to run a DICT server on this information?

Maybe they could improve their English design?

[RedLaggedTeut]

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):

foundation/base(engineering,housebuilding,metaph or ical)
= 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)

(OT) Interested in Esperanto

[KWTm]

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

Doomed to fail - these guys are stupid...

[fatphil]

"""
People from sci.lang google group have already discovered possible problems of this concept.
"""

google group? for fuck's sake.

FP.

Re:Doomed to fail - these guys are stupid...

[Blitzenn]

The glaring problem is that a word in English may have a completely different meaning in another language. The new Wordnet format is assuming that a single word has a single meaning across all languages.

Cool...

[Anonymous Coward]

I just noticed on that site (on the left side)that one of the phrases you can look up is "slashdot effect"

Re:Cool...

[Altus]

yea... but you can never reach that page....

Re:Cool...

[vsprintf]

yea... but you can never reach that page....

Woa, what happens if you look up "Heisenberg principle"?

SkyNet has awoken!

[peter303]

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.)

Re:The flaw or maybe not

[autophile]

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.

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

Much better name.

[Stonent1]

Why not Wiki-Dicky?

Ladies and Gentlemen of the Supposed Jury...

[revision1_1]

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.

Re:better tu-chemnitz as leo

[183771]

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

Re:Spoken American is easy, written is much harder

[Wiwi Jumbo]

I'm not positive, but I believe "guitar" is French.
Which would kinda explain the pronunciation. Starting off with "g'ee-tar" originally and then going to "g'ah-tar".

But I'm probably wrong...

A copy of the message I sent to them

[Thomas Miconi]

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-

Re:A copy of the message I sent to them

[oninojudo]

While it would help to start from an unambiguous language, you could start from any language without much difficulty. The hardest place will be making the first set of mappings. After that, if a definition is too ambiguous for a word you are seeking to link, you split it as many times as necessary. All existing links are cloned as well, but you add fineness for the newly translated language.

Still miserably difficult, though.

Re:A copy of the message I sent to them

[Em Adespoton]

There is a problem with this method -- how do you organise the numbers, so that adding new meanings is possible?

For example, in one language (Mayan, I think), there is no word for pink. This is not a problem, until you discover there is no concept of "pink" in the society, and they don't even use the colour.

Going the other direction, you have situations like German, where new words are created by compounding meaning from old words -- does this become a new number, or just a compound of the other numbers?

Then there is the fact that meanings of words drift over time -- for example, the word corporal, which has two different meanings in english, both which originate in Latin; conversely the words virtue and virile both come from the latin word for man. Languages like Arabic have a central symbol for a concept, and variants on the written and spoken word denote variations in the original concept -- no word stands by itself, but carries degrees of connotation related to the words close to it in its word group.

The point of all this is that by the time such a lexicon was completed, the original meaning of words in many of the languages would have drifted from the original recorded value (look at how fast the word "gay" has changed meaning in english, also how many times "nice" has changed meaning), while in other languages it would have become more ingrained in the context of its position in the language. This is why some people prefer "dead" languages like Latin as a go-between language, because at least meanings don't shift in a language that is no longer commonly used.

Re:A copy of the message I sent to them

[Thomas Miconi]

The organisation of number in a meaningful way is the major challenge. It is perfectly possible that this organisation ends up being completely arbitrary (i.e. just adding new meanings sequentially).

If a language lacks a word for a given concept, well the corresponding entry is not referred to in the translation table for this language, that's all.

As for German, Finnish and other agglutinative languages, if your "meaning table" is complete enough, no matter what word, there should be an entry for it. If not, well, it means you have a new concept that never was encountered in any language. So you just create a new entry ! You may also want to modify the translation tables for other languages to accomodate for this new entry (find a description for this meaning to put in the description table, and the closest matching word for the translation table). Voila, you're done.

Clearly the difficulty lies in the clear definition of concepts, sufficiently clear to distinguish between every word of every language. This is extremely difficult. But if it can be done, then certainly a collaborative effort based on the internet is the way to go.

Thomas-

Most Common Second Language

[SeanDuggan]

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.

GPL now, anyway . . .

[acceleriter]

. . . until it becomes profitable to take everyone's contributions, close it up, and start charging money. Sort of what Gracenote did with CDDB.

Re:The flaw or maybe not

[SeanDuggan]

English not only borrows words and phrases from other languages, it borrows grammar
"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.

Obligatory response & attack joke to " Engrish

[managerialslime]

If someone who speaks three languages is trilingual,
and someone who speaks two languages is bilingual,
then someone who speaks one language still must be....................

.............................. an American.

Re:The flaw or maybe not

[otisg]

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.

Logos

[AmicoToni]

A very useful multi-language dictionary is Logos.it

Re:The flaw or maybe not

[lifebouy]

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.

Re:The flaw or maybe not

[lifebouy]

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.

What about noun gender?

[mellon]

It seems to have a good collection of words, but no indication of noun gender. Am I missing something?

Re:The flaw or maybe not

[CRCulver]

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.

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.

Re:Language indepedent; phrase-based

[Teancum]

What's the English equivalent of "deja vu"?

Answer: deja va

Really, this is so widely used by native English speakers, including media references and every day useage that it has become a part of the language. If you mean what is the translation to Anglo-Saxon (or Middle English), that would be another issue altogether.

There was an earlier project sponsored by the University of the United Nations that did something similar. However, they acknowledged that English by itself couldn't be the "backbone" of any system, and instead used a concept numbering system that also included the ability to add words that may not have equivalents in English.

For instance, I don't know of any reasonable English translation for the Portuguese word "soldade". I can give it a formal definition (being the longing feeling that you have for somebody or something you love and miss). A reasonable translation would be "homesickness", but there are other cultural conotations in English that make that an imperfect translation, not to mention the subtle cultural context that "soldade" has in Portuguese. The two words really are different memes.

There are, however, words that do translate completly, like "fire hydrant" to "aquador de fogo". It means exactly the same thing in both languages, and even the cultural context for each is so nearly identical that you can easily substitute one for the other. Of course you even have cognates where even the same word is wholly adopted into another language, like "deja vu" mentioned above. However, even here you can have a context difference where the adopting language only has a narrow use of the word, and the original language can have many other contextual meanings to what is implied.

BTW, the best "backbone" language I've heard used is Esperanto, in part because of its roots in acedemia, and in part because it doesn't have a political agenda when used in multi-lingual translation projects (like translating a document between three or more languages).

Re:easy for a fake lang to be orthographic and sim

[ZB Mowrey]

1...this is not mutual to English...
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.

Re:real languages have dialects; Esperanto would t

[sluggo5]

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.

Re:The flaw or maybe not

[Bob Uhl]

Dear Lord--are all linguists leftists?

Actually fdicts almost is planned thway(followup)

[RedLaggedTeut]

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 ;-)

Nowhere to go?

[SeanDuggan]

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...

Partisan "advertising" on Slashdot....

[macraig]

I really wish people would have the decency not to use Slashdot to self-promote or promote their pet cause or project. It's so partisan that it immediately calls into question the objectivity of the person and the veracity of the story. I frankly am amazed that we (in the USA) allow political candidates to vote in their own election, as if they'd ever vote for an opponent? Could we ever expect someone reporting on his own project to ever have anything but glowing testimony for it?

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....

Re:The flaw or maybe not

[Vintermann]

"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.

Re:The flaw or maybe not

[Vintermann]

"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.

Re:Language indepedent; phrase-based

[Teancum]

The reason for the "backbone" is that you need to have some method of doing a many to many translation.

For example, the United Nations has six official languages: French, English, Russian, Chinese, Arabic, and Spanish. All of the proceedings of all events, especially treaties and General Assembly meetings, are done in all of these languages... usually simultaneously.

Obviously in this case when somebody is speaking you have a one-to-one correspondance going from the original language to the target for translation, but in the case of treaties, it gets a little more complecated. And there are some substantial difference between all six of these languages that include some cultural issues that make some huge differences. And changes to these documents are coming from speakers of all of these languages simultaneously. Mere coordination would require at least a working "backbone" language to offer coordination between all of these different languages.

In the case of the Portuguese word "soldade", since I don't speak Japanese I don't know even what could possibly be the translation. That is another purpose of a "backbone", where you have a common language between multiple languages where there is not a direct interface between two specific languages. I do know a Japanese-Portuguese dictionary does exist, but what about more obscure languages like Tongan and Navajo? I don't think a Tongan/Navajo dictionary exists, and I would be surprised if there is even a single person in the world that speaks both languages (remotely possible, but unlikely). This is where the backbone comes into play to act as a bridge between the two languages.

one community dictionary

[mattr]

is ALC, apparently this is based on contributions from the public. (It is Japanese English.)

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.

fucktard right wing mods

[Travoltus]

That wasn't a troll or flamebait post. Idiots.

Re:and what about a free Operating System

[Travoltus]

My post was intended as sarcasm.