[Tibeto-burman-linguistics] Norman-Coblin's empirical approach to understanding the development of the many Sinitic language varieties

[John Lowe]

Colleagues,

On December 18, 2025, the UC Berkeley Cybersecurity team detected
"vulnerabilities" in the STEDT database website at stedt.berkeley.edu.

We therefore had to take the search engine down. The "static pages",
including STEDT publications, documentation for the search engine, and
other reference materials, remain up for now.

Since then, we have been working to address the shortcomings and bring the
site up again. There is no schedule for when this might happen, but ...
"soon".

There are many considerations about how to do this, I'll rehearse them
someday somewhere else.

In the meantime, I have mounted the search engine on my own AWS EC2
instance (yes, plz google), and you can access an older version of the site
at:

https://54.213.58.250/rootcanal.pl

If you are challenged about a "bad certificate" or other security problem
with this site, I advise you to ignore it and click through to the site. If
this happens to you,  I would appreciate it if you'd let me know.

(Historical aside: The STEDT project ended in 2014 and the team gradually
disbanded after that. David Mortensen wrote the first "web accessible"
version, called 'tagger.pl', the ancestor of all subsequent versions, using
PERL and MySQL in 2011; it in turn was based loosely on an earlier
"desktop-only" version that I wrote, Tagger, written several times in
several computer languages, notably FoxBase Pro for Mac. Since then the
public interface was intensively developed by the STEDT team into the
interface we are familiar with, still using PERL and MySQL; several other
versions were also developed but are no longer running. The software has
been running in one shape or another with almost no support for well over a
decade!)

(The database version is from the fall of last year.)

Note that the code for the STEDT interface is in a somewhat messy GitHub
repository:

https://github.com/stedt-project/

And the *original* STEDT database, from 2014, while still to be
"officially" archived, is available at:

http://projects.johnblowe.com/stedtdb_v1.0.tgz

Please do send me your questions, comments, suggestions, criticisms,
corrections and especially encouragements to jblowe at berkeley.edu.

Regards,

JB Lowe
www.johnblowe.com

PS: Sorry for the long email,

"Je n'ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n'ai pas eu le
loisir de la faire plus courte!" -- Pascal
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