Author Archives: Julie Anderson

Digitizing Balinese Literature from Lontar Palm Leaves


May 7, 2019 ||

In 2011, the Internet Archive photographed nearly the entire collection of Balinese palm-leaf manuscripts (130,000 leaves in all) as part of an effort to bring out of the shadows the lesser-known literatures of the world and to inspire others to do the same. These traditional Balinese texts were inscribed with a special triangular iron stylus […]


Radically inclusive machine translation gets mainstream press


March 7, 2019 ||

In a recent article, linguist Gretchen McCulloch of WIRED magazine echoes PanLex’s series on radically inclusive machine translation. She notes that only a small number of languages have well-supported machine translation. Most of the world’s 7,000 languages have little or no machine translation support, including some with tens of millions of speakers. However, that could […]


PanLex on the Moon


February 21, 2019 ||

PanLex has long envisioned having a global impact for the good of humanity. Now PanLex is going beyond Earth, to the Moon! Press release: The Arch Mission Foundation today announced the upcoming launch of the first installment of their Lunar Library™, a 30 million page archive of civilization, created as a backup to planet Earth. […]


Palindrome Reflections


October 11, 2018 ||

There are 54,270 palindromes within the 5,691 languages contained in the PanLex database. A sampling: ʻuhū ʻuhūʻuhū meaning “moan” in Hawaiian gilibilig meaning “soft” in Umbugarla (Australia) àyáyáyáyá meaning “low light” in Perge Tegu (Mali) eibohphobie meaning “fear of palindromes” in French بی عیب ـ بیعیب  or ba’eab ba’eab meaning “faultless” in Persian ibikíbiníbikíbi meaning “wherever” in Yoruba (Nigeria) aawalawaa meaning “get better” in Wayuu (Colombia) апоко́па or apokopa meaning “apocope” in […]