Query Details
| Query Subject: |
Parallel multilingual word lists
|
| Author: | Daniel Wedgwood |
| Submitter Email: | click here to access email |
| Query: |
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 pu together. Since lists based on common meanings are required, works that list only cognates in different languages are unfortunately no 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 a www.wordgumbo.com/ie/cmp/iedata.tx 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 |
