Hacker News Reader

Comment by iagooar | Hacker News Reader

I am a person who, as a polyglot, feels a lot of passion for languages, and can get really upset when I hear about languages that are dying. Guess you could compare the feeling with those of animal species getting extinct.

I often ask myself if I, as a programmer, could contribute to helping preserve at least some information about that of dying languages, or even prevent them getting extinct at all? Any ideas?

View on HN

How about organizing an effort to collect entries like the ones in Untranslatables, for endangered languages? This could be done as a CC-licensed dictionary with source on github. A markdown template would be useful, and a way to collect all submissions into a nicely typeset PDF.

http://www.amazon.com/Dictionary-Untranslatables-Philosophic...

Google partnered with several research foundations to back http://www.endangeredlanguages.com/ It's not as specific as a dictionary, but it does provide a simple way to find particular languages and upload source material for them.

Researching and preserving endangered languages for posterity is mostly field work. For the most part, hardly any online records (apart from those collected by researchers) exist. It's very interesting work because documenting endangered languages means studying them in their 'natural habitat'. It's probably as Indiana Jones as a linguist's work can be.

That said, computational linguistics and especially statistical language models (HMMs etc.) are very useful for finding and describing distinctive language features once the data has been retrieved in the field. This is an area of expertise you might get involved in.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com