Comprehensive Language Catalogue

[Martin Haspelmath]

Dear typologists,

In our efforts to achive a comprehensive catalogue of the world's 
languages, we could be inspired by the Encyclopedia of Life project (see 
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Scientists_to_bring_all_species_together_in_Encyclopedia_of_Life), 
which has set itself the much more ambitious goal of cataloguing all the 
world's species. The Enycyclopedia of Life people have a US$12.5m grant 
-- maybe linguists could also get some rich people interested in this? 
There should be some glamour in an Encyclopedia of Languages as well...

Incidentally, the webpage of the recent Leipzig workshop on a language 
catalogue now contains most of the presentations (see 
http://email.eva.mpg.de/~haspelmt/cat.html), so that you can get a 
better sense of what we have been discussing here.

Greetings,
Martin

-- 
Martin Haspelmath (haspelmath at eva.mpg.de)
Max-Planck-Institut fuer evolutionaere Anthropologie, Deutscher Platz 6	
D-04103 Leipzig      
Tel. (MPI) +49-341-3550 307, (priv.) +49-341-980 1616

Glottopedia - the free encyclopedia of linguistics
(http://www.glottopedia.org)