by - 1 Comment

Preserving Endangered Languages

Yesterday The New York Times had a good piece on endangered languages, which describes a joint effort between the National Geographic Society and the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages to record languages on the verge of extinction. My favorite factoid: a group of Andean natives called the Kallawaya, who speak Spanish and Quechua in daily life, have a secret language that’s mostly used to describe medicinal plants.

Wordie is doing its small part to preserve language. Long after Wrigley has thrown in the towel on strappleberry, this important word will remain forever enshrined here.

by

Listphile

My pal Steve just launched Listphile.com, a site for making collaborative lists of all kinds. It’s beautiful, super easy to use, and worth checking out. It just launched, but already has an enjoyable assortment of user-contributed lists spanning the gamut from lighthearted fun (The Dude Abides, Yoda Quotes with Video) to more serious collective information gathering (Open Surf Atlas). Stop by and vote for Wordie on my list of Language-related sites.

by

Email notifications

You can now be notified by email, if you choose, when someone comments on your profile or one of your word lists. If you go to your profile and click on the ‘edit contact options’ link, you can turn this feature on or off.

This is the default behavior for new wordies, but if you joined before this Saturday you’ll have to go in and turn notifications on, if you want ’em–it seemed kind of spamish to turn them on retroactively.

Suggestions for ways to improve this, for other kinds of notifications, or other ways to make it easier to follow Wordie are appreciated.

by

From the NY Times Morgue

This photo of the back of a photo was posted yesterday on Paper Cuts, the New York Times book blog. I love the juxtaposition of so many kinds of text–handwritten notes in pen and pencil, stamps in different colored inks, pasted on bits of newsprint.

Digital objects can develop their own patina (like the digressions on digressions in the conversations on a good Wordie word), but some kinds of beauty require this sort of physical manipulation over time.

The Twombly link in the second comment on the original post is worth following, too.

by

"We are talking about words"

Tumbledown.com recently posted this video of Frank Zappa on a 1986 episode of Crossfire, defending words and the First Amendment. It’s a relic from the culture wars of the ’80s, back when Tipper Gore was fronting the PMRC campaign to censor music.

The first 10 points Zappa makes: “We’re talking about words!”, which he says over and over. Once he stops repeating himself, he goes on to smoke the competition, John Lofton of the Washington Times.

To my mind the money quote is when Zappa is asked if he’s an anarchist, and replies “No, I’m a conservative.”

by

Wordie becomes xenophobic, gets over it

So as a few of you noticed, I screwed up the database transfer from the old hosting company to the new, and rendered all non-English characters unreadable. I just re-did the transfer of the old data, merged it with the stuff that’s been added since the transfer, and, knock on wood, all the words with Chinese and German and Greek and Hebrew and Arabic (I think) characters, along with ones in a bunch of languages I didn’t recognize, should be working again. I’m sorry if that startled anyone else. It scared the crap out of me, frankly, when I thought for a moment that we’d permanently lost all that good stuff.

This did provide an interesting data point. Of the 90,031 unique words in Wordie when I did the transfer, 1,973, or around 2.2%, contained unicode characters. A few of those are accented English words or words entered with ligatures, but the great majority are in other languages. Hopefully that number will grow, and hopefully someday Wordie can cater fully to other languages, with localized and translated versions.

Tomorrow I’ll fix the comments and profile info that contain international characters, but for tonight I’m going to quit while I’m ahead. Let me know if you come across any words or lists that are still munged.

update, 9/11/07: The unicode in the comments is fixed now, too.