electronic materials [Re: Mouton "discounts" for ALT members]

[Sebastian Nordhoff]

On Fri, 11 Nov 2011 15:30:42 +0100, Peter Arkadiev  
<peterarkadiev at yandex.ru> wrote:

> 1) Availability to the language community
> Do you really think that a MLG or any other academic reference grammar  
> could be a really useful thing for a linguistic community? As a symbol  
> of prestige to be put among other sacred and venerable objects, perhaps,  
> but for actual use - hardly. What native speakers of our languages need  
> are teaching materials and texts in their own language, enhancing its  
> use and transmission. Huge volumes to understand which one must not only  
> know English but also have special training are largely useless for  
> linguistic communities. Probably I am mistaken, please, tell me if I am.

I can only speak for Sri Lanka: There are a couple of Sri Lanka Malays  
studying linguistics (or something close to it) at Sri Lankan  
universities. Anything with a Western price tag on it is out of bounds,  
even for university libraries. Furthermore, there are a couple of  
non-Malay Sri Lankan linguists who are interested in this language, an  
interest which is probably beneficial to the community.
The speech community at large will not find a descriptive grammar a very  
enjoyable read, but that is true for grammars of English/Russian/German in  
the respective speech communities as well.

Best
Sebastian