Language and linguistics bookmarks...
(See also the bookmarks on
the
aq.org home page.)
Chinese-learning resources (all new)
(The links below here haven’t been checked or updated since 2007,
though.)
Dictionaries
-
Словари Яндекс is a collection of dictionaries from Russian into English,
German, or French. You can click a link to turn on a virtual
keyboard so you can enter Russian words even if you don’t have
a way to type Russian on your system.
-
zhongwen.com is a neat site about Chinese characters; you can look up
characters in several ways (including by English translation)
and see their pronunciation, meaning, and component parts.
This is
exactly what I wish I had access to when I was learning Chinese!
- The
Diccionario de la lengua española of the Real Academia Española is
searchable online. (Since this is a monolingual Spanish dictionary, you need
to know some Spanish already for it to be useful.)
(new)
-
William Whitaker’s Words (http://www.archives.nd.edu/cgi-bin/words.exe) is a relatively sophisticated Latin dictionary hosted at the
University of Notre Dame. It takes an inflected word and parses
it (and will do reasonable things with affixes).
- The University of Notre Dame’s
Latin Dictionary and Grammar Aid (http://www.nd.edu/~archives/latgramm.htm) lets you look up words by stem or dictionary headword. I’ve
found it useful as a dictionary, but it’s not very good about
parsing words — for instance, it won’t show you the definition
of ‘vox’ if you give it ‘voc’ as the stem and ‘is’ as the (e.g.
genitive) ending; you need to know that the headword is ‘vox’
or just search for ‘vo’ and wade through all the words that start
with ‘vo’.
-
Le Grand Dictionnaire terminologique de l’Office québécois de la langue française
is a nifty online French dictionary of technical terminology (in
many fields). In addition to getting definitions in French,
you can get or look up translations in English. (Theoretically
Latin, too, but I couldn’t get that to work.)
Writing systems
(See also below under
East Asian languages.)
East Asian languages
(Note: Although I’ve listed them together here, these languages
are not related. Chinese, Japanese, and traditional Korean
writing systems, however, are related.)
-
The Japanese Writing Tutor has
katakana and
hiragana tables, and a few
kanji, with animations showing how to write each character.
-
zhongwen.com is a neat site about Chinese characters; you can look up
characters in several ways (including by English translation)
and see their pronunciation, meaning, and component parts.
This is
exactly what I wish I had access to when I was learning Chinese!
-
mandarintools.com has a lot of useful tools for learning or reading Chinese,
such as a
Chinese Character Dictionary.
- There’s an etymological dictionary of Chinese characters and
some other Chinese etymological material at the oddly named
internationalscientific.org.
-
Mei Wah (http://www.inu.org/meiwah/) is a web site about deciphering Chinese characters on menus
and restaurant signs (which may help you figure out, for instance,
whether the dish translated as “Five Majesty” has shellfish in
it, or whether the food in a particular restaurant is likely to
be spicy). It is
not intended to actually teach you Chinese, but it’s a pretty nifty
casual introduction to the Chinese writing system that you can
actually put to use. And it has lots of photographs of restaurants
I eat at with some frequency.
Slavic languages
-
Словари Яндекс is a collection of dictionaries from Russian into English,
German, or French. You can click a link to turn on a virtual
keyboard so you can enter Russian words even if you don’t have
a way to type Russian on your system.
-
False friends of the Slavist is a collection of pages about “false friends” among Slavic
languages – meaning words that are similar in form in various
Slavic languages, but have different meanings. (For instance,
magasin in French is a false friend of English
magazine, because it means “store”. As in many of these cases, German
Weib “woman” has a
similar meaning to its English false friend
wife.)
-
Balkan Rusistics at
http://www.russian.slavica.org/ is an online journal with “current issues in Russian Linguistics;
works in the History of Russian Language; Cognitive, Crosscultural,
Psycho- and Sociolinguistics; Russian as a second language;
Applied Rusistics, Corpus Linguistics, and other topics in Computational
Linguistics, Classical and Contemporary Russian Literature, Traditional
Folklore, Philosophy of Language, etc.”
-
An on-line Russian reference grammar from Bucknell University.
- The Russian Language Institute of the Academy of Sciences (Институт
русского языка
Академий наук
СССР; I’m a bit puzzled that
the name still has СССР in it) has
a hugely comprehensive academic grammar online (in Russian) at
http://rusgram.narod.ru/index1.html.
-
Slovio (http://www.slovio.com/) is an artificial language based on Slavic languages. (Knowing
Russian, I can read it pretty well.) It is to the Slavic languages
more or less as Interlingua (q.v.) is to the Romance languages.
If you need a generic, hard-to-place Slavic language for a
piece of fiction you’re writing, you might want to check it out.
Romance languages
- The
Diccionario de la lengua española of the Real Academia Española is
searchable online. (Since this is a monolingual Spanish dictionary, you need
to know some Spanish already for it to be useful.)
(new)
-
Orbis Latinus (http://www.orbilat.com/) has Latin and Romance resources.
-
William Whitaker’s Words (http://www.archives.nd.edu/cgi-bin/words.exe) is a relatively sophisticated Latin dictionary hosted at the
University of Notre Dame. It takes an inflected word and parses
it (and will do reasonable things with affixes).
- The University of Notre Dame’s
Latin Dictionary and Grammar Aid (http://www.nd.edu/~archives/latgramm.htm) lets you look up words by stem or dictionary headword. I’ve
found it useful as a dictionary, but it’s not very good about
parsing words — for instance, it won’t show you the definition
of ‘vox’ if you give it ‘voc’ as the stem and ‘is’ as the (e.g.
genitive) ending; you need to know that the headword is ‘vox’
or just search for ‘vo’ and wade through all the words that start
with ‘vo’.
-
Wikibooks has
a Latin self-teaching textbook at
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Latin.
- Tufts University’s
Perseus Digital Library has a number of
classical texts (in the original and in translation), as well as a few other
text collections. I’ve listed it here for the Latin, since
I don’t read Greek at all.
-
Textkit (http://www.textkit.com/) has Greek and Latin learning resources, including downloadable
public-domain textbooks (e.g. grammars) and texts (e.g.
De Bello Gallico) in PDF format.
-
Interlingua (http://www.interlingua.com/) is an artificial language originally intended for international
scientific communication. It takes its vocabulary and (simplified)
grammar mainly from the Romance languages. Knowing English
and a bunch of Romance languages, I have no trouble reading it.
(Slovio is a similar project based instead on Slavic languages.)
If you need a generic, hard-to-place Romance language for a piece
of fiction you’re writing, you might want to check it out.
Old English
Constructed languages
-
Slovio (http://www.slovio.com/) is an artificial language based on Slavic languages. (Knowing
Russian, I can read it pretty well.) It is to the Slavic languages
more or less as Interlingua (q.v.) is to the Romance languages.
If you need a generic, hard-to-place Slavic language for a
piece of fiction you’re writing, you might want to check it out.
-
Interlingua (http://www.interlingua.com/) is an artificial language originally intended for international
scientific communication. It takes its vocabulary and (simplified)
grammar mainly from the Romance languages. Knowing English
and a bunch of Romance languages, I have no trouble reading it.
(Slovio is a similar project based instead on Slavic languages.)
If you need a generic, hard-to-place Romance language for a piece
of fiction you’re writing, you might want to check it out.
- The most famous constructed language is
Esperanto (http://www.esperanto.net/), which dates from the 19th century. It’s primarily the product
of one person, and while its grammar is extremely regular, its
vocabulary is somewhat eclectic (although it mostly comes from
Romance). Esperanto is probably the most successful artificial
language, which isn’t saying much.
Other
Last modified 2013.09.25 by
js.