Now that the Balinese lontar project on Palmleaf.org has proven successful, the Internet Archive recently suggested that we move it to a well-established platform so the Balinese community can take over management, and so it can be maintained long-term. The obvious choice is Wikisource, both because of the nature of the content (lontar works are […]
PanLex project director David Kamholz recently attended the UNESCO High-level Event, “Making a decade of action for indigenous languages”. Held February 27–28 in Mexico City, the event brought together diverse stakeholders from around the world to plan for the 2022–2032 International Decade of Indigenous Languages (IDIL) that the UN has proclaimed. PanLex wants to be […]
Word origins can vary widely within and across languages. For certain concepts like ‘water’, ‘head’, or ‘egg’, the modern words often resemble the ancestors of these words from thousands of years ago. On the other hand, for wanderwort concepts like ‘taxi’ or ‘sushi’, borrowing across languages is the norm. Nearly anywhere you go in the […]
What if you fed a machine-learning algorithm a list of ice cream flavor names and tasked it with creating new ones? What if you fed it a bunch of pick-up lines and got it to generate new ones? What would the results be like?