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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Dear colleagues, I am sending you all this
information in case you<BR>could publish it in your electronic newsletter. I do
hope we might establish<BR>a joint project. I'd like to tell you about our group
of Phonostatistics<BR>and Typological Studies. It would be very kind of You to
let<BR>me know about Your activities in the field of phonostatistics
and<BR>typology in the West. I planned to attend the conferences in the West
<BR>(for instance in Prague)to renew my contacts or to set up new ones.
<BR>Actually, now that democracy came to Russia, it is harder to travel to
<BR>the West from Novosibirsk than before, since the transportation
cost<BR>more, than before, when every post-graduate student could pay his
<BR>ticket to go to Moscow. Now a Novosibirsk linguist cannot find
enough<BR>money to go even to Moscow. I failed to find a bursary for my trip to
<BR>Prague as well as any other conference in the West.<BR>This is why your
e-mail infromation is of great interest and importance<BR>to us. In fact, e-mail
is the only contact with the colleagues in <BR>the profession.<BR>If You happen
to inform us about some international conferences on<BR>phonostatistics, we'd be
most grateful. Please,be so kind as to let us<BR>know. Our group of phonological
studies of Siberian, Paleo-Asiatic,<BR>Uralo-Altaic, Far East, Oceanian
languages and some isolated languages<BR>(Korean, Nivh, Ket, Yukaghir, Japanese)
is looking<BR>forward to establishing close contacts with all the
world<BR>colleagues in these fields of linguistics: typology and
<BR>phonostatistics.Many articles on Siberian, Finno-Ugric, Turkic,
<BR>Mongolian, Tungus-Manchurian and Paleo-Asiatic <BR>languages could be
published on our data. Now our small group is <BR>working on the texts<BR>of the
112th language of the world: Dolgan. We have computed the following
world<BR>languages:1. Japanese; 2.Nivh; 3.Ket; (Finno-Ugric):
<BR>4.Mansi(Vogul):Sygva, Sosva, and Konda dialects; 5.Hanty(Osjak): Kazym and
Eastern <BR>dialects; 6. Hungarian; 7.Komi-Zyrian; 8.Udmurt (Votiak); 9. Mari
(Che-<BR>remis): Mountain and Lawn dialects; 10 Mordovian: Erzia and Moksha;
<BR>11 Vepsian; 12. Vodian; 13. Karelian: Tihvin, Livvikov and Ljudikov;<BR>14.
Saami (Lopari); 15. Finnish; (Samoyedic):16. Nganasan; (Turkic):<BR>17. Azeri
(Azerbaidjanian); 18. Tatar: Sibirian-Baraba and Kazan; <BR>19. Altai
(Kizhi);20. Kumandin(Altai); 21.Turkish; 22. Turkmen; <BR>23. Jakut(Saha);
24.Karakalpak; 25.Kazah; 26. Kirgiz; 27. Tofalar;<BR>28.Shorian; 29. Dolganian;
30.Hakas; 31.Ujgur; 32.Uzbek; (Tungus-<BR>Manchurian): 33.Nanai; 34. Negidal;
35. Evenk (Tungus); 36.Even;<BR>37. Uljch; 38. Orok; 39. Oroch; 40. Nivh;
(Mongolian): 41. Mongolian;<BR>42.Buriatian; 43. Kalmykian; (Slavonic):
44.Russian; 45. Ukrainian;<BR>46. Belorussian; 47. Sorbian; 48. Serbo-Croatian;
(Iranian): <BR>49. Gilian; 50. Persian (Iranian); 51. Tadjikian; 52. Pushto;
<BR>(Paleo-Asiatic): 53. Iteljmen (Kamchadal); 54. Chuckchian; 55.
Jukagir;<BR>56. Eskimo:Siberian and American; 57. Arabic; 58. Mangarayi
(Aboriginal <BR>Australian); 57) Korean and many others - 111 all in all. Many
of <BR>these languages are endagered. I'm sure it is high time to establish
<BR>the corpora for the endagered languages. I wonder what the world
linguists<BR>think about this idea. Should the corpora for the endangered
languages<BR>be created? Or should it not? Is it important or should we forget
about<BR>this idea, since it is not important at all? Our main goal,
though,<BR>is to find out the universal characteristics of the sound pictures of
<BR>world languages and to calculate the phonological distances <BR>on the basis
of the frequency of occurrence of phonemes and phonemic <BR>groups. Then we plan
to publish the word frequency dictionaries of the<BR>languages mentioned above.
As a matter of fact,many of these languages <BR>are still on the old
punch-cards, but we are transfering them on PC diskettes.Many <BR>of the texts
(e.g. Japanese,Persian,Arabic, Hebrew, Korean, etc.) are fed in the form <BR>of
phonological transcription. We could exchange some of the material <BR>in the
electronic form. We'd be also happy to work together on<BR>some joint project
with linguists all over the world.<BR>Yuri Tambovtsev, Novosibirsk, Russia.
E-mail address:<BR> <A
href="mailto:yutamb@hotmail.com">yutamb@hotmail.com</A><BR></FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>