Of the world’s 7,000 languages, approximately half have some kind of writing system. Enabling digital support for all of these writing systems is a monumental undertaking. The Unicode standard has encoded 151 scripts—alphabets, syllabaries, and so on—as of the latest version. These include everything from common alphabets like Latin and Cyrillic to Han characters (used […]
In a previous post, we introduced the Balinese Lontar Project that PanLex is managing, in coordination with the Internet Archive and Udayana University. We have some exciting updates from the last two months. The team at Pusat Kajian Lontar at Udayana has given us great feedback, PanLex’s transcription platform is now live at palmleaf.org, and […]
The island of Halmahera is a spider-shaped island located in Indonesia’s Maluku Islands. It was these islands, the so-called “spice islands”, that several European nations sought in the 15th and 16th centuries as the source of cloves, nutmeg, and mace. Along the east coast of Halmahera, the closely related Austronesian languages Patani and Sawai (among others) […]
Proper nouns (names of unique things in the world, such as Berkeley and James) can be translated in the same way as common nouns (names of classes of things, such as city and person). For example, the same city in Ukraine is known as Lviv in English, Львів (L’viv) in Ukrainian, Львов (L’vov) in Russian, Lwów in Polish, and Lemberg […]
On November 25, the PanLex team began a month-long stay in Yogyakarta, a city on the island of Java in Indonesia. Mataram, the historical region in which Yogyakarta is located, was controlled by several medieval and early modern kingdoms, and then for two centuries was part of the Dutch East Indies. The region is home to two […]