Review of the Human Languages Page

Technical Information

Name of site:
Human Languages Page
URL:
http://www.willamette.edu/~tjones/Language-Page.html
Developer:
Tyler Jones
Contact:
tjones@willamette.edu
Date site last updated:
2/12/96
Keywords:
Encyclopedias and dictionaries
Language and languages


Review

This page gathers linguistic resources from all around the world and is available in several languages: Dutch, German, French, Portugese, Spanish and Afrikaans, Norwegian. This is a very comprehensive gathering; along with dictionaries, access is also provided to many literature resources and text projects. I even found a Middle English dictionary (word searches here take you to texts in which your word is used) and a technical terminology dictionary. I used SGML as a test-it quickly yielded several definitions. Many of the sites provide access to audio resources, which can be downloaded and used on your local system.

A real effort has been made to represent as many languages as possible, but the available resources vary widely. One inherent problem comes with how Web browsers deal with non-Roman characters. There are helpful links to sites that provide font packages that can be downloaded.

This is a very helpful, comprehensive site. Although you can't do a keyword search for a language, an alphabetical index is provided that gets you to your desired language quickly. I found myself happily moving from one site to another: I had a hard time just using one site, then leaving. Something else would catch my eye, and off I'd go.

Notes:

This page contains no large graphics, and is generally easy to access. But since this page is basically a collection of links, access to the various language resources can vary widely. And access is provided to a variety of formats: from Web to ftp. Some sites will load quickly, others may be hard to reach; I gave up on several sites that were taking too long to load. The author considers this a work in progress, and encourages input and information about new resources.


Link to the Human Languages Page
Reviewed by Eileen Flick, University of Southern California on March 18, 1995.
flick@calvin.usc.edu