Online Nepali dictionary launched

[Carl Grove]

This URL will get you to the online dictionary: www.nepalisabdakos.com. From
here (Kathmandu) it's a little slow, so it might be even slower if you're
not in Asia.

I had the pleasure of attending the ceremony at which this online dictionary
was launched on Tuesday afternoon. This is the result of a 3 year
collaborative effort on the part of a professor (Pat Hall) from The Open
University (UK), students and professors from the Central Department of
Linguistics at Tribhuvan University in Kathmandu, the EU, Lancaster
University, ELRA, and Goteberg University. The online dictionary is just one
component of this project (Bhasha Sanchar Project - Nepali Language
Resources and Localization for Education and Communication). Other
components of the project included development of the Nepali National
Corpus, development of dictionary compilation software, implementation of
Nepali text-to-speech functionality and the development of the first unicode
Devanagari font and development of corpus and computational linguistics
curriculum at Tribhuvan University. In addition, the IT related work was
done on a version of Linux developed and localized to work specifically with
Nepali.

I've had the opportunity to work with the Central Department of Linguistics
at Tribhuvan University for the past 8 months and I must say there is an
excitement about this project and about linguistics in general here - of
course, with over 100 languages in a space half the size of Alabama there's
plenty for linguists to get excited about (including those interested in
language policy).

If you want more information about the project you can email
info at bhashasanchar.org; web sites are http://wwwmadanpuraskar.org or
http://www.bhashasanchar.org (although this site seems a little
underdeveloped at the moment).

Peace,

Carl Grove

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-lgpolicy-list at ccat.sas.upenn.edu
[mailto:owner-lgpolicy-list at ccat.sas.upenn.edu] On Behalf Of Don Osborn
Sent: Thursday, December 13, 2007 8:50 PM
To: MINEL at yahoogroups.com; lgpolicy-list at ccat.sas.upenn.edu
Subject: FW: Online Nepali dictionary launched

FYI... (fwd from the Unicode list)...


KATHMANDU, Dec 12: The Nepali language contemporary online dictionary was
launched Tuesday with a view to minimise increasing dependency of the Nepali
language on foreign ones.
http://www.gorkhapatra.org.np/content.php?nid=32128

The site should be at http://www.bhashasanchar.org/ - but it turns up empty
now. I guess the enthusiasm was perhaps a bit too much for their bandwidth
to cope with.

--
Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven <asmodai(-at-)in-nomine.org> / asmodai
イェルーン ラウフロック ヴァン デル ウェルヴェン
http://www.in-nomine.org/ | http://www.rangaku.org/
In every stone sleeps a crystal...