LINGUIST List 9.1649

Fri Nov 20 1998

FYI: Pashto Dictionary, European Language Resource

Editor for this issue: Karen Milligan <karenlinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Taylor Roberts, Pashto word list now on the web
2. Dr Tony McEnery, Recompiling the European Languages Resource Catalogue

I am delighted to announce that a Pashto word list has been made
available on the web.

Pashto is spoken in parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan by over 10
million people, and several of its apparently unusual features have
recently been studied by linguists, including its clitics, prosody,
relatively free word order, relative clauses, and reversed-sonority
consonant clusters.

Drawn from the glossary of Herbert Penzl's _A Grammar of Pashto: A
Descriptive Study of the Dialect of Kandahar, Afghanistan_
(Washington: American Council of Learned Societies, 1955,
pp. 154-165), the lexicon contains nearly 1,400 words. Because the
glossary in Penzl's grammar is Pashto-English only, the computerized
format permits queries in the other direction (English-Pashto), and
also facilitates searches for sub-parts of definitions, information
about parts-of-speech, and sound sequences.

Penzl's glossary appears on the web by the kind courtesy of the
American Council of Learned Societies, which otherwise continues to
reserve all rights to this material.

The word list is available in two formats: it may be viewed online, or
downloaded as a Microsoft Access 2.0 database (the latter with a
pop-screen giving a key to the orthography). Both formats are
available at the following URL:

	http://web.mit.edu/troberts/www/pashto/lexicon.html

Please feel free to visit the site and send me your comments. Enjoy!

Taylor Roberts

trobertsmit.edu
http://web.mit.edu/troberts/www/

Dear All,

	I am currently working with a few people here at Lancaster on a
new version of the catalogue of the European Language Resources
Association (ELRA). Our wish is to make the catalogue as useful as
possible to a wide range of users. To that end we have mounted a web
questionnaire so that you can make your views known about what should be
included in the new catalogue. You can get to the questionnaire at
http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/computing/users/nick/elra_intro_q1.htm

	Thanks in anticipation of your cooperation,

	Tony McEnery