LL-L "Resources" 2011.05.09 (02) [EN]

[Lowlands-L List]

=====================================================
L O W L A N D S - L - 09 May 2011 - Volume 02
lowlands.list at gmail.com - http://lowlands-l.net/
Posting: lowlands-l at listserv.linguistlist.org
Archive: http://listserv.linguistlist.org/archives/lowlands-l.html
Encoding: Unicode (UTF-08)
Language Codes: lowlands-l.net/codes.php
=====================================================



From: Marcus Buck list at marcusbuck.org
Subject: LL-L "Resources" 2011.05.09 (01) [EN]

As many people here on the list are into languages and translation, I want
to introduce to you the website Tatoeba.

Tatoeba is dedicated to collecting sentences and translating them into as
many languages as possible. As of now it's a corpus of about 850,000
sentences in 91 languages (among them 6,400 in Low Saxon). Everybody can
collaborate and contribute or translate sentences. The project is meant as a
help for language learners by providing example sentences/translation for
any possible topic and area of life. (Tatoeba is from the Japanese word たとえば
meaning "for example".)

The link is <http://tatoeba.org/>.

Marcus Buck

----------

From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
Subject: Resources

Thanks, Marcus. It's a pretty interesting idea.

I watched the video introduction, but I am still now sure what the purpose
and the system are.

If I search for a simple sentence such as "What is your name?" nothing shows
up, at least not so far. However, by chance I later found that English
sentence with its Scottish Gaelic equivalent, by searching for "what." But
random searches bring up sentences like "Space travel will become
commonplace some time in the future" and "Despite being no big deal its
unnecessarily pompous."

A language has a finite number of words and idiomatic expressions. The
number of possible sentences, on the other hand, is infinite. So why index
sentences other than as examples under head words?

And why is selecting and copying any given sentence not an option?

I may be missing the point here, and I am sorry if I misrepresent anything.
But this exercise reminds me of what I watched Japanese people do in trying
to learn foreign languages: collect and memorize random sentences while
hardly improving their speaking and reading skills.

Regards,
Reinhard/Ron
Seattle, USA

 =========================================================
Send posting submissions to lowlands-l at listserv.linguistlist.org.
Please display only the relevant parts of quotes in your replies.
Send commands (including "signoff lowlands-l") to
listserv at listserv.linguistlist.org or lowlands.list at gmail.com
http://linguistlist.org/subscribing/sub-lowlands-l.html .
http://www.facebook.com/?ref=logo#!/group.php?gid=118916521473498
===============================================================
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lowlands-l/attachments/20110509/86df1d76/attachment.htm>