LINGUIST List 14.1083

Fri Apr 11 2003

Qs: Multilingual Word Lists; Ted Dunning

Editor for this issue: Naomi Fox <foxlinguistlist.org>

The LINGUIST List 'Just $5' Request As of 3pm, 04/10/03, we ONLY have $11108.43 to go! Target: $50,000 Total Raised: $38891.57 Number of Donors: 920 Percentage of Subscribers Donated: 5.41% If every one of our 17,000+ subscribers donated JUST $5, we would raise over $85,000 - we are only asking for $50,000! Please keep LINGUIST List free and support the student editors with a donation; Just $5 will make a world of difference. DONATE - Don't Hesitate http://linguistlist.org/donate.html Instructions on How To Donate http://linguistlist.org/donation.html We'd like to remind readers that the responses to queries are usually best posted to the individual asking the question. That individual is then strongly encouraged to post a summary to the list. This policy was instituted to help control the huge volume of mail on LINGUIST; so we would appreciate your cooperating with it whenever it seems appropriate. In addition to posting a summary, we'd like to remind people that it is usually a good idea to personally thank those individuals who have taken the trouble to respond to the query. To post to LINGUIST, use our convenient web form at http://linguistlist.org/LL/posttolinguist.html.

Directory

  1. Daniel Wedgwood, Parallel multilingual word lists
  2. Jem Clear, Calling Ted Dunning

Message 1: Parallel multilingual word lists

 Date: Thu, 10 Apr 2003 18:37:24 +0100 (BST)
From: Daniel Wedgwood <danling.ed.ac.uk>
Subject: Parallel multilingual word lists


Does anyone know of good sources of parallel word lists in a number of
languages? I'm looking for any fixed set of 'meanings' given in a
variety of languages -- the 100- or 200-word Swadesh lists would do
fine; longer lists would be even better. The intention is to use these
for research into computational methods of cross-linguistic
comparison.

Collections of lists from non-Indo-European language families would be
particularly useful. Since the Swadesh list is a recognised 'standard'
list, I'd also be interested to learn of references to works
containing the Swadesh list for just a few languages or even a single
language, in the hope that a significant number of these can be put
together. Since lists based on common meanings are required, works
that list only cognates in different languages are unfortunately not
so useful.

I'm already aware of the following resources, which others may also
find useful:

www.rosettaproject.org - includes a large database of Swadesh lists,
but at present most of them are far from complete

Dyen, Kruskal and Black's Indo-European data (from "An Indoeuropean
Classification: A Lexicostatistical Experiment", Transactions of the
American Philosophical Society, 1992, vol. 82/5), available online at
www.wordgumbo.com/ie/cmp/iedata.txt

I'd be very grateful to receive any pointers to other useful resources
and will post a summary of responses.


Dan Wedgwood
Theoretical and Applied Linguistics,
University of Edinburgh
Mail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue

Message 2: Calling Ted Dunning

 Date: Fri, 11 Apr 2003 05:16:02 -0400
From: Jem Clear <jemJEMCLEAR.CO.UK>
Subject: Calling Ted Dunning

I need to contact Ted Dunning -- he was once at the Computer Research Labs
(??) at New Mexico State University. Anyone got a current email address for
him now? He did some corpus work in the early 1990s using Log Likelihood in
computing interesting corpus-derived statistics.

(Sorry to clutter up the list with this intellectually-vacuous post, but I
don't know how else to track the guy down. Google didn't come up with
anything after about 1994.)
Mail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue