Language Research
For the more advanced and adventurous, here are some pages reflecting recent linguistic research as well as useful language-learning applications that fall short of complete grammars (verb conjugators, etc.)
Recent News
There are more than 7,000 languages spoken in the world. According to K. David Harrison, (professor of linguistics at Swarthmore College and author of "When Languages Die: The Extinction of the World's Languages and the Erosion of Human Knowledge"), in an interview with Mark Molaro, more than half of those languages are expected to become extinct by the end of the century - dying with them irreplaceable knowledge about the natural world.
Greg Anderson (co-founder and director of LivingTongues: Institute for Endangered Languages) and K. David Harrison set out on a mission to record nearly dead languages including Chulym, a language with an ethnic population of around 500, spoken in the Basin of the Chulym River north of the Altay Mountains and Sora with an ethnic population of about 288,000 in India. Along with Jeremy Newberger, a documentary filmmaker, they recorded their trek and created the film "The Linguists".
The film was shown at the Sundance Film Festival and screenings were held throughout January. The work was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation and produced by Ironbound films.
Research
Noam Chomsky:
The Central Linguist of the 20th Century Here are a few pages from the man who developed the very concepts of current linguistic theory. You can find a select bibliography on his home page at MIT. More informative is this library of his articles. An outline of the evolution of his theory of syntax may be found here. Noam Chomsky is also one of the leading humanists and supporters of human rights in the world.
Languages of Afghanistan "Pahlawi/Farsi/Dari" is a short article explaining the relationships of the three major languages of Afghanistan.
Alta-Vista Multilingual Translator. This remarkable engine translates entire paragraphs back and forth between English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish with remarkable accuracy.
Arabic Morphological Analyzer. This is an experimental Java applet with a built-in keyboard for those who don't have their own. From Xerox Research Center Europe.
Shape Schematization in Assamese Classifiers by Jugal K. Kalita. The concept of schematization has been discussed at length in the context of English spatial prepositions. In this paper, Kalita shows that the idea of space schematization also applies to an extended set of classifiers or enclitical definitives that are found in an Indo-European language called Assamese.
Austronesian Language Comparison by Raymond Weisling. This is a comparison of core vocabulary of 13 Austronesian languages, including Indonesian, Javanese, Balinese, Sundanese, Madurese, Sawu, Toraja, Tagalog, Maori, Fijian, Hawaiian, Malagasy, and Rapanui.
Allen and Greenough's New Latin Grammar. An on-line version of the classic Latin grammar book contributed and maintained by James O'Donnell.
Byron Bender's 'Morphological Paradoxes'. This is the written version of a talk on morphology given as a guest lecture in Ling 615, The Nature of Language, Fall Semester 1994. The focus was on the foundations of linguistics-morphology in this case.
Bulgarian Morphological Analyzer. Hristo Krushkov of the University of Plodiv maintains this morphological analyzer of Bulgarian. Insert an entire Bulgarian sentence and each word will be identified and analyzed. Alternatively, you may enter any two agreeing words and check their agreement.
Comparative Slavic Morphosyntax: The State of the Art. Several papers on some of the latest work in Slavic morphosyntax by Babby, Boskovich, Corbett, Franks, and Rappaport. The articles cover clitics, noun phrases, agreement, voice and wh-movement.
The Ergative State of Early Proto-Indo-European by Hans-Joachim Alscher. This on-line article examines briefly the syntactic structure, the origin of the case system and verbal affixes in Proto-Indo-European.
French Conjugation. You insert the infinitive and select the verbal tense, voice, and mood, and the INFL analyzer will give you the conjugation. The INFL analyzer is a licensed product of the MultiLingual Theory and Technology team at the Rank Xerox Research Center, in Grenoble, France made available to ARTFL through a technology exchange agreement. The principal developers of INFL are Lauri Karttunen and Annie Zaenen.
French Morphological Analyzer. The ARTFL Project: morphological analysis using the INFL analyzer allows you to enter one or more French words (lower case only, no punctuation) at the prompt and returns the context-free morphological analysis for each term.
GERTWOL German Morphological Analyzer. There isn't much information about the analyzer on the site but it seems to work well.
German Morphology Browser. The program knows 1.2 million words, their morphosyntactic features and their mapping to some 130.000 lexemes. In addition, it knows all relationships between simple and complex lexemes. Out of the 130.000 lexemes, only 13.4% are simple. The rest are complex and based on the simple lexemes. However, this site is a demo of technology and content.
Greek Morphological Analyzer. The Perseus Project: morphological analysis using the morphological analyzer allows you to enter one or more Greek words in Latin transliteration at the prompt and returns the morphological analysis for each term.
Hindi Morphological Analyzer (Tagger). Type in a phrase or word and this analyzer will identify the parts of speech and their morphological functions. Written by Vasu Renganathan of the University of Pennsylvania.
Hindi-Marathi-Telugu Morphological Analyzers This morphological analyzer allows you to choose your language and your font. It includes links to pages with other linguistic resources for Indian languages and English, dictionaries, the National Institute of Information Technology in India.
Other Indian Language Morphological Analyzers This website has morphological analyzers for Hindi, Telugu, Kannada, Marathi, and Punjabi. Downloads are also available.
Indo-European Documentation Center. This site includes links and materials from a number of ancient Indo-European languages, the Numeral Project on early counting systems, and several on-line papers, including a reader of nineteenth century Indo-European studies edited by W. P. Lehmann.
International Phonetic Association This is the association the sponsors the International Phonetic Alphabet, the symbols that represent all the sounds of all natural languages. The entire alphabet is available on this site.
Italian Clitics by Paola Monachesi This site contains many of Dr. Monachesi's articles on Italian and Romanian clitics which may be downloaded.
Latin Parser and Translator. This is a beta or developers copy of a Visual Basic program which Adam McLean designed to assist people in translating from Latin into English. I am making this available in the hope that it might help people undertake some translations (download).
Multilingual Verb Conjugator. Now you can conjugate at least some of the regular verbs in 27 different languages. The LOGOS verb conjugator gives you all the forms of regular verbs in its database for 27 languages, including Italian, French, Spanish, Polish, German, Esperanto, English, Latin, Portuguese, Greek, Finnish, Czech, Croatian, Sicilian. It is a work in progress that still lacks many verbs.
Sanskrit Decliner and Conjugator by Gerard Huet. This inflection engine provides all the forms of Sanskrit Verbs and Substantives when you type in a transliterated form. Transliteration tables are provided elsewhere on the site. Michael Bunk has a decliner here in German.
The Roots of Mambila: Convergence and divergence in the development of Mambila by Bruce Connell. This paper shows that Mambila comprises two major dialect clusters, though the division is not that envisaged by previous researchers. This paper provides evidence of a new division among Mambila dialects and then explores the relative roles of divergence and convergence in Mambila and what the Mambila situation can tell us about the dynamics of language change more generally.
Study Guide to Wheelock's Latin Grammar. This study guide was written by Dale Grote of UNC Charlotte. It contains many conjugation and declension paradigms to supplement Wheelock.
Spanish Morphological Analyzer (Licensed). This C/C++ morphological analyzer that makes use of the ARIES Spanish lexical interface listed on the same page. This permits to improve efficiency by integrating word segmentation with lexical access also. By now, it is a (pseudo)-unification chart based parser for context-free morphological grammars.
Conjugate Spanish Verbs This conjugator is on a commercial Spanish language school page but the conjugator is free. It also offers Spanish language course teasers, one lesson a day.
Swahili Noun Classes. This is a preliminary report by Ellen Contini-Morava on a two-phase study of the semantics and syntax of noun classification in Swahili. Phase I, the topic of the present paper, is an investigation of the semantic structure of the noun classes, from a cognitive-semantic perspective.
Tamil Case System This is a scholarly excursion into the Tamil case system by Harold Schiffman of the University of Washington. It includes a discussion of the postpositions.
Verbix Verb Conjugator Here is a verb conjugator that conjugates the verbs of over 50 different languages for you.
Welsh Conjugational Endings and Irregular Forms. This is the appendix of an on-line Welsh grammar by Mark Nodine. The rest of the grammar may be accessed through the built-in buttons.
WordNet. WordNet is an on-line lexical reference system whose design is inspired by current theories of human lexical memory. English nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are organized into synonym sets, each representing one underlying lexical concept. Different relations link the synonym sets.
World Atlas of Language Structures Matthew Dryer has begun this website dealing with the typology of languages. It has a good list of language families with examples of each and a library of articles on the subject.
XTAG Tree Adjoining Parser. XTAG is an on-going project to develop a wide-coverage grammar for English using a feature-based and lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammar formalism. XTAG also serves as an system for the development of TAGs and consists of a predictive left-to-right parser, an X-windows interface, a morphological analyzer, and a part-of-speech tagger (download).
Language Identifiers
Have a foreign word but don't know which language it comes from? See if these language guessers can identify it. If you aren't successful this time, come back in a month or two and try again; new languages are added constantly.
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