Handheld 'Phraselator' helps preserve North American native languages (fwd)

[William J Poser]

I've seen some information about this. What distinguishes it
from any old digital audio player is the interface, which lets you
select the utterance that you want to play. The reason that a
defense contractor is involved is that the US military is using
these things in Iraq. Since most soldiers speak little or no Arabic,
they can find the utterance that they need, e.g. "Hands in the air!",
and play it back in real Iraqi Arabic. If you just had a long list
to scroll through as on many music players, somebody would be dead
by the time you found the right phrase.

As a means of documenting endangered languages these are not
of much interest since they they are much more expensive than
regular digital recorders. For language learning again it is cheaper
and more versatile to put the recordings on a regular computer.
The putative virtue of these things is that language learners can use
them to have real conversations. I suspect that they aren't worth the
cost. Even with several hundred or thousand utterances on them, they
can't cover a very wide range of things that one wants to say,
especially in languages with elaborate morphology. My impression is
that they get people excited because they can carry around with them
some "real language", but that they are actually not very useful.
I think that the people pushing this probably have good intentions,
but it looks like more "eye candy" to me.

Bill