Each month, PanLex generates and publishes new “fake words” such as “unequalitis” and “adjustache” to entertain our newsletter readers in the Fake Word of the Month challenge. But how, exactly, are these fake words generated? We use an emergent property of the linguistic information contained in the PanLex Database, and a simple probabilistic algorithm. Translation quality […]
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 […]
The PanLex Database currently contains lexical translation data from 549 languages spoken in Indonesia. Each dot on this map represents one of those languages, scaled to show the number of words in that language that PanLex has collected. With the help of our supporters, PanLex will be able to increase our coverage of languages for […]
The PanLex Database uses thousands of sources (multilingual dictionaries and databases) to produce word translations. Let’s go under the hood a little on this complex and interesting process. Let’s meet the Platyplex visualization.
Don’t crane your neck In the late 18th century, European travelers first began to penetrate the dense forests of the interior of northern Sumatra. From earlier reports, they expected to find tribes of headhunters and cannibals. What they found were highly literate cultures with centuries-old writing traditions and vast collections of books (and yes, a […]