E-mail this message to a friend

Dear LINGUIST List subscribers,

The MultiTree project (http://multitree.org/), a digital library of 
language relationship hypotheses, has been supported through your 
donations since 2008. These donations are greatly appreciated, because 
they have allowed students such as myself to work on this project and 
if you donate this year, the work we’re doing will continue:

http://linguistlist.org/donation/donate/donate1.cfm

Each student on MultiTree is given language families to focus on, 
which means that we correspond with preeminent historical linguists 
specializing in those families. We then search for the hypotheses 
that are suggested by the specialists as well as find more on our 
own. This research is used to present our users with a range of 
hypotheses while highlighting the most accepted hypotheses in our 
composite trees.

Through these efforts, the MultiTree library has grown to include 1,092 
language family trees that are freely available to the public. Our 
hyperbolic tree viewer allows one to pull subgroups and languages into 
the foreground and view a whole tree, making it possible to view huge 
language families such as Niger-Congo. The public may also download, 
comment on, and compare the trees within the library. 

The comparison feature's ability to display two hypotheses in the same 
browser window is an important feature in our discipline, where hypotheses 
for languages families can vary greatly depending on the specialist and 
the time period in which they were written. In addition to providing 
these hypotheses in accessible format, MultiTree offers an impressive 
bibliography of sources for those who are interested in learning more 
about a particular family.

We've accomplished a lot so far, but there's still so much more that 
we hope to offer in the future. As we continue adding hypotheses into 
the library, we also want to make improvements to the site, such as 
building an enhanced commenting facility that will hopefully lead to 
fruitful discussion between specialists, students, and other interested 
communities. We'd also like to make our full bibliography available for 
downloading.

The continued development and maintenance of MultiTree (http://multitree.org/) 
can only happen with your ongoing support. Please donate today to ensure 
that this resource is available for all to use and to help students like 
me continue to work on this valuable resource:

https://linguistlist.org/donation/donate/donate1.cfm

Thank you so much for your continued support of The LINGUIST List and 
MultiTree.

Kind regards,

Danielle St. Jean
MultiTree Editor
The LINGUIST List 

This Year the LINGUIST List hopes to raise $67,000. This money will go to help 
keep the List running by supporting all of our Student Editors for the coming year.

See below for donation instructions, and don't forget to check out Fund 
Drive 2011 site!

http://linguistlist.org/fund-drive/2011/

There are many ways to donate to LINGUIST!

You can donate right now using our secure credit card form at  
https://linguistlist.org/donation/donate/donate1.cfm

Alternatively you can also pledge right now and pay later. To do so, go to: 
https://linguistlist.org/donation/pledge/pledge1.cfm

For all information on donating and pledging, including information on how to 
donate by check, money order, or wire transfer, please visit: 
http://linguistlist.org/donation/

The LINGUIST List is under the umbrella of Eastern Michigan University and as 
such can receive donations through the EMU Foundation, which is a registered 
501(c) Non Profit organization. Our Federal Tax number is 38-6005986. These 
donations can be offset against your federal and sometimes your state tax return 
(U.S. tax payers only). For more information visit the IRS Web-Site, or contact 
your financial advisor.

Many companies also offer a gift matching program, such that they will match 
any gift you make to a non-profit organization. Normally this entails your 
contacting your human resources department and sending us a form that the 
EMU Foundation fills in and returns to your employer. This is generally a simple 
administrative procedure that doubles the value of your gift to LINGUIST, without 
costing you an extra penny. Please take a moment to check if your company 
operates such a program.

Thank you very much for your support of LINGUIST!