otherlanguages.org
. . . Main links

intro page in English / Chinese / Hollands / Magyar / Svenska

link to i-mode page

#

dictionaries, translation

#

other alphabets

non-alphabetic scripts

#

endangered languages

#

other links

#

sign languages

#

maps

#

songs and music

#

dead languages

#

linguistic philosophy

#

artificial languages

#

AI, speech recognition

#

encryption, steganography

#

language history

#

calligraphy

#

cognitive psychology

#

mathematical linguistics

#

animal communication

#

language list

links page 1

other pages [2] [3] [4]

*1

this page: dictionaries, translation / other alphabets / non-alphabetic scripts / other links / endangered languages

dictionaries, translation

quicker-loading websites

Check out the glossarists at http://www.glossarist.com/ - a pretty good list of lists

Working hard at satisfying dictionary needs, monolingual and multilingual, are http://www.yourdictionary.com and http://www.dictionary.com

http://reality.sgi.com/btd/babelfish.html is apparently a quicker and more error-free interface to Babelfish, named after the translating fish from the 'Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy'

http://dictionaries.travlang.com/ is the dictionaries part of travlang, the bit you might want to visit first (how to put that Portuguese phrase into good Swedish?), and the quick-loading bit too

More curiously, a site promising quick language-learning using soundalike memory tricks, at http://www.unforgettablelanguages.com

http://www.rhodes.edu/forlanghtmls/genlang.html is a useful collection of general language links, as are http://www.languageimpact.com/
http://languagebox.com/LanguageZone.html
http://www.language-learners.com/aboutll.htm
http://www.language-learning.net/
http://www.foreignlanguagelearninglinks.com/
http://www-writing.berkeley.edu/chorus/call/
http://www.foreignlanguagehome.com/
http://www.edvista.com/claire/call.html
http://llt.msu.edu/
http://www.languagelearn.co.uk/
http://ilk.kub.nl/~signll/
http://www.georgetown.edu/departments/linguistics/

And a wonderful facility you may not think is handy until you find you suddenly need it - a database of hundreds of common herb and flower names in several European languages pieced together by friends like Henriette, Alessandro, Pawel and other collaborators... http://www.ibiblio.org/herbmed/database.html ...a fine store of information

slower-loading websites

http://www.travlang.com/ is a language superstore bursting with colourful features

http://babelfish.altavista.com/translate.dyn is the more official face of the deservedly popular Babelfish site

Three handy online dictionaries for a tricky trio of East-European languages; Polish-to-and-from-English at http://www.poltran.com, Czech-to-and-from-English is here at http://www.mtranslations.cz/30/en/dictionary/dictionary.htm and Hungarian-to-and-from-English is here at http://dict.sztaki.hu/english-hungarian with, logically enough, Hungarian-to-and-from-German at http://dict.sztaki.hu/deutsch-ungarisch

other alphabets

quicker-loading websites

Korean ~ is an interesting one, because at a casual glance a Westerner can mistake it for Chinese ideograms - yet it is an alphabet, or at least a syllabary... in a wonderful way Korean letters (and they are letters, perfectly phonetic) can group on top of each other in little bunches of two or three and so look a bit like some of the simpler Chinese characters - discover more at http://catcode.com/kintro/cons1a.htm and http://www.teleport.com/~napoleon/korean/modernalphabet.html and http://members.aol.com/keithenev/Language/Korean.htm

Japanese culture is the proud owner of not one, but two alphabets, which go alongside the extensive use in Japanese of about half the set of Chinese word characters (three to four thousand rather than the seven to eight thousand recognised by educated Chinese readers) - so you can go to these sites to learn the more important hiragana alphabet, plus the katakana alphabet they use to spell words imported from foreign languages, http://www.harapan.co.jp/english/japan/hiragana.htm and http://www.1freespace.com/art/japanxstacey/jp.html

and some more lovely websites about Japanese (check also the right-hand column) http://entropy.tmok.com/~tumble/qadgtj.html#preface" target=_blank http://www.lingolex.com/jap/comver.htm http://133.41.17.13/mizumat/pictcards_e.html

Arabic ~ one of the most beautiful and cursive scripts, is an old, grand language unifying a huge culture of five hundred million people spread across over twenty countries and two continents - one of the world's most misunderstood cultures, now more than ever; Check out http://www.al-bab.com/arab/visual/calligraphy.htm for writing and calligraphy in one of the world's most calligraphy-conscious languages http://www.sakkal.com/ArtArabicCalligraphy.html and more calligraphy at http://www.arabiccalligraphy.com/ while for learning the language http://www.omniglot.com/writing/arabic.htm http://www.ukindia.com/zar1.htm and once you've learned it, this Arabic-language online bookshop at http://www.saehlib.com/main.aspx can help you start to enjoy one of today's oldest and largest living literatures

Hindi ~ the biggest language of the world's now most populous country (yes, more people than China), India;

Learn Hindi, like Arabic, again from the remarkable UKIndia site http://www.ukindia.com/zhin001.htm download Hindi fonts from http://www.ebazm.com/hindi.htm Hindi and Urdu maps are at http://www.cs.colostate.edu/~malaiya/hindiint.html is an overall list of Hindi resources http://www.cs.colostate.edu/~malaiya/hindilinks.html Hindi software http://sanskrit.gde.to/hindi/ A multicoloured Hindi alphabet http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/plc/hindi/alphabet/ a guide to Hindi with song lyrics http://www.hindilyrix.com/

and two sites about the Canadian Inuit script, based on Pitman shorthand of all things, at http://www.halfmoon.org/inuit.html and on the splendid omniglot at http://www.omniglot.com/writing/ucas.htm

slower-loading websites

http://www.shodouka.com/ is a remarkable site; the idea is you can view other sites through it, and so not need to download software to look at Japanese writing, and http://www.lfw.org/shodouka/http://www.thehaucks.com/lesson4.html is an example of the concept in operation http://www.wellscs.com/robert/nihongo/howjapan.htm http://www.angelfire.com/yt/lvovjya/linkss.html http://japanese.about.com/homework/japanese/bl_verbs.htm http://www.magenet.com/~pam/ http://pweb.cc.sophia.ac.jp/~britto/weblab-j.html

A sometimes slightly slower, but neat and clear guide to both Japanese alphabets at http://www.acsys.com/~tallman/ktable3.html

http://laurencio.webz.cz/mongolxel/qaguchin/bichig.htm is a beautifully mellow website about the traditional Mongolian script - so clearly laid-out that English-speakers shouldn't fret about the explanations being in Spanish

While http://members.tripod.com/ggdavid/georgia/language/anbani.htm is a colourful site about the Georgian (or, rather, Gruzian) alphabet, but of course a little 'Tripod' box pops up when you open the site

http://www.angelfire.com/ga/Georgian/alphabet.html is a richly-coloured introduction to Georgian also, but this time with a little Angelfire box opening itself without asking you

For more on Arabic, check out http://user.cs.tu-berlin.de/~ishaq/arabic/asm/asm.html for some old software links and a few magazines in Arabic and about the Arab world


*2

non-alphabetic scripts

quicker-loading websites

http://www.zhongwen.com/ loads fast and is a clear introduction in English to written Chinese ~ the language and on-line resources

A mighty set of clearly-arranged Chinese dictionaries is at http://www.chinalanguage.com/Language/Dictionaries/ecdict.html with all the major systems for coding Chinese ideograms in Western letters or numbers.

http://tech.irt.org/articles/js133/#viewing is a clear list of references in English about software you need to view websites that are written in Chinese script

*2 *3

slower-loading websites

http://www.ocrat.com/ocrat/chargif/ is a good introduction to Chinese in English and has little moving drawings to show those with Java-enabled PCs how to write Chinese characters properly (it's much easier if you keep to the established sequence for drawing the pen strokes in each character - it's not unnecessary pedantry as you might think - it helps)

http://www.chinapage.org/is a big list of Chinese-language sites, energetically beautified and recoloured during December 2000 - very comprehensive

If you go to http://www.nttdocomo.com/i/tagindex.htmland then click on 'list of picture symbols'3/4 of the way down the page, you get a list of visual mobile-phone-screen symbols for such everyday concepts as 'fog' or 'karaoke' used on Japanese DoCoMo i-mode handsets - Japan is of course a place, like China, where written language is a lot more than an alphabet

At least as ancient a type of picture-writing as Chinese ideograms was Egyptian heiroglyphs, and here, at http://www.torstar.com/rom/egypt/egypt.html you can use an on-line translator and make little sentences up in semi-authentic heiroglyphic script - because of course the writing of ancient Egypt gives us an intriguing chance to see the transition from pictorial to phonetic writing ...they had pictograms, but the symbols, while staying pictorial, over centuries came to also convey sounds and work more like an alphabet, which http://library.thinkquest.org/J002037F/heiroglyphics.htm explains, as does http://homepages.tcp.co.uk/~nicholson/egypt/heiroglyphics.html with all three sites featuring charming mock-sandstone colour schemes

other links

quicker-loading websites

A multilingual and customer-focussed rare-book dealers who will search for hard-to-find titles, at http://bookdealers.home.mindspring.com; while a book I translated from Hungarian to English a couple of years ago is at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/ 1899197508/qid%3D997986204/002-3180084-4553627

These sterling weblogs at http://www.grayblog.co.uk/ http://www.parallaxview.nu/ + http://www.plasticbag.org/ and http://www.robotwisdom.com definitely deserve regular visits


*3

slower-loading websites

An events guide to one of Europe's ~ oddest and most interesting cities is at http://www.livebudapest.com

~ Slightly slowed by graphics of paintings and photographs, a site about an unusual English artist living in a village in eastern Hungary is worth checking out; currently here at Robin Sperling, abstract painter

An adventurous and meticulous East-European translation and communications agency is at http://www.hungarolingua.hu - they have beautiful graphics, with the delays this can bring for slower browsers

And the weblogs continue to compel: http://www.iloveeverything.co.uk/ not forgetting the robust http://www.dutchbint.org via whom comes the lovely [and multilingual] pork piano, naturellement en la langue francaise aussi - worth waiting for the download http://www.zerpentin.com/flash/flash.asp?fn=porkpiano.swf&w=640&h=480&ft=Porkpiano

info@eurocityguide.com info@gravis-austria.com mail@premium-swiss.com rbaulesch@vip.at
remote-printer.europeancityguidevalencia@442074875586.iddd.tpc.int
remote-printer.europeancityguidevalencia@12129497247.iddd.tpc.int

endangered languages

quicker-loading websites

These are some useful general sites for linguists and others working with endangered languages in general, with pride of place going to a European bureau for lesser-used languages (eblul.org) - perhaps a better phrase than 'endangered' languages in fact....
http://www.tooyoo.l.u-tokyo.ac.jp/ichel.html http://www.helsinki.fi/~tasalmin/ europe_index.html and the purpose-built http://www.ogmios.org/

Specifically Canadian indigenous languages are smartly introduced at http://www.ohwejagehka.com/

slower-loading websites

For a glimpse of one of Europe's most intriguing languages, try this - a short excerpt from Federico Garcia Lorca's Blood Wedding translated into Gypsy/Roma by Dragan Ristic.....

LEONARDO Nashti te iris amen, achi, von si but pashe amendar, pal me musaj te lingrav tut.
BORI Zorasa? Sajek? Palpale?

LEONARDO Zorasa? Pal ko majanglal mangla te nashel.
BORI Me sema.

LEONARDO Ko godo nevo kantari shuvda pe moro grast?
BORI Me semas! Godo sas godo!

LEONARDO Kasko vastoro buzuvni po grast shuvda?
BORI Akala vast save si tjire, kana dikhen tut von kamen trujal tji kor te aven. Kamav tut, bares kamav tut! Te mudardem tut po limori e parne luludjora ka shuvav tuke. Oj, savi bibah, savi jag ka pharjovav ka pharjovav!

LEONARDO Chindjardi churi pe tiri kovli chib. Te bistrav me kamlem. Bari plajin me vazdem mashkar amare khera. Kade sas? Avel tuke o gindo? Kana dikhava tut dural more jakha me phandava. Feri e graste me tradava sar dilo koro manus thaj vov arakhla vudar tiro. Sumnakane suva chindjarde moro ilo Thaj miri tati rat achili kali, Me nashti bango te avav shaj avel vareko aver Bangi si kaja phuv kade shukar kaj kerda tut. Thaj e sung savi avel andar tjire putarde bala thaj andar tjiro kolin.
BORI Oh, dilipe! Sar te trajiv tusa po jek manro thaj po jek serand? Tu cirdes man thaj me dzav, dzav pala tute sar e balval. Muklem sukare Rome po abijav thaj e familija, Kana ascardem te khelav e pirostijasa an more bala. Pe tute e holji ka perel, so me chi mangav. Muk man, nash mandar akana. Khonik nasti zutil mange feri me.

LEONARDO Chiriklji thaj chiriklo mashkar e krandza licaren pe phaka E ratji si shudri. E rat ande kadi ratji shutjol, Po bar savo si sar e churi. Ando garudipe amen ka dzas kaj ka kamav tut chumidav tut, naj mange achilo pala aver manusha thaj pala bilachipe savo avel andar lengo muj.
BORI Ka shuvav moro kolin pe shero tjiro o suno te avel tuke maj mishto sar dzuklji kaj sem. Kana dikhav tut tiro shukaripe mudarel man.

LEONARDO Jag pe jag dzal!
BORI Le man katar o vasari po vasari Thaj sikav mori dukh Te but manusa saj dikhen sar more bijaveske seja Po cheri khelen.

LEONARDO Kana gindiv sar trubul musaj te mukav tut. Feri me dzav katar tu dzas. Thaj vi tu. O chonut baro khuvda moro kolin tire kolinesa sumnakane thavenca.
BORI Ashunes?

LEONARDO Aven!
BORI Dza! Musaj kate te merav Kalo pani ka halavel more purne E karne ka aven pe moro shero Kana merava feri von ka dikhen man Ka dikhen e uze cheja thaj e romnja savi kerda baro bibahtalipe.

LEONARDO Achi!
BORI Dza! Nash!

LEONARDO Maj poloke! Chi dikhen amen. Dza! Tu anglal inke jekhvar.
BORI Feri khetane.

A Dakota language homepage is at http://www.alliance2k.org/daklang/dakota9463.htm

this page: dictionaries, translation / other alphabets / non-alphabetic scripts / other links / endangered languages

*1 image by kind permission of / seeking permission
*2 image by kind permission of / seeking permission
*3 "Heaven" or "Sky" in written Chinese; image by kind permission of / seeking permission

info@eurocityguide.com info@gravis-austria.com mail@premium-swiss.com rbaulesch@vip.at
remote-printer.europeancityguidevalencia@442074875586.iddd.tpc.int
remote-printer.europeancityguidevalencia@12129497247.iddd.tpc.int