geographic interfaces to OLAC data
Jeff Good
good at EVA.MPG.DE
Wed Jun 14 08:57:17 UTC 2006
Hello,
I passed this note along to Michael Cysouw who I knew had been
thinking about such things. Here's his response:
> The basic search that I would like to see should combine
> geographical and genealogical relations, like:
>
> - give me all information available about the nearest 50 languages
> to this one language
> - give me all information available about the 10 genealogically
> most closely related languages
> - give me all information available , ordered by genealogical
> relationship, and within that ordered to geographical relationship
>
> Visual output is always nice, but for me not really essential.
>
> Ideally, we would like to have geographical information prepared
> for linguistic querying, but I still haven't found a geographer
> that would like to help me with providing such information.
> Basically, we would need two distance-measures for two point on the
> globe: A) how much time does it take to walk from point X to Y?
> Measure B) how much time does it take to go by boat from point X to
> Y? Then we could ask questions like:
>
> - give me all information available for the downriver languages,
> ordered by distance along the river.
> - give me all information for nearest coastal languages, measured
> by distance along the coast.
>
> etcetera
I don't know if OLAC will have genealogical data, too--but if/when it
does, this is something to think about.
The issue of how to measure distance between languages is an
interesting one that I don't think there's much consensus on.
Obviously, one could start with a very simple metric, but, in the
long run, more complex ones might be nice, too. But, as Michael
points out, that will require some outside help.
Jeff
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