Avibase is a multilingual bird database with 1.9 million entries on 10,000 species and 22,000 sub-species. In case you need to know that the Black-crowned Sparrow-Lark is called Saharanvarpuskiuru in Finnish.
The French version of the home page makes me smile. When they ask you to enter a “nom d’oiseau”, this is meant literally (scroll down to the very bottom of the page).
Il neige dans mon cœur
Comme il neige sur la ville,
Quelle est cette langueur
Qui recouvre mon cœur?
O chuchotis de la neige
Par terre et sur les toits!
Pour un cœur qui se piège
O musique de la neige!
Il neige sans raison
Dans ce cœur qui s’écœure.
Quoi! nulle trahison?
Ce deuil est sans raison.
C’est bien la pire peine
De ne savoir pourquoi,
Sans amour et sans haine,
Mon cœur a tant de peine!
With my humblest apologies to Paul Verlaine.
Related posts: MDLS / WOTW: Moineau de Lesbie, Anagram poetry, More Gay Ant Rap, Little Women en V.F. : c'est la consternation, Reading Little Women, Absence / Presence, and a new poem, DITL
Technorati (tags): humour, inspiration, literature, littérature, poésie, poetry
Merriam-Webster offers a collection of five search tools for download to access their free online dictionary and thesaurus directly from inside Firefox. There is even a “Get Firefox” button for those who still haven’t tried it. They have a solution for every taste: bookmarklet, the Firefox search field, a M-W toolbar, right-click search… Excellent!
Dictionary publishers outside the English-speaking world (Robert, Larousse, Duden…) are asleep on their catalogues.
Via mozillaZine.
Related posts: Seen elsewhere -- Avibase, Multi-lang II, Multilingual, multilingue, mehrsprachig, flersproglig, amlieithog, 多言語, Lectures, Pseudo-phonetics, DITL, What's your MP up to?
Technorati (tags): dictionary, dictionnaire, language, multilingualism, outils, tools, web
20th Paris Carnet (the monthly blogger meetup in Paris) last night. Very pleasant.
Très agréable Paris Carnet hier soir. J’ai enfin pu parler un peu avec Kozlika (dont je suis une admiratrice dans l’ombre) et Veuve Tarquine, qui a la tête bien sur les épaules et le sens de la formule ; fait la connaissance de Bix de Mouche (que j’avais déjà a l’œil) ; et de l’home sans cerveau (chais […]
read the post »I’d just like to point out that snow in Paris is rare, especially in March. I don’t have any photos of my own (yet?) but there are some nice ones online: on flickr, in this gallery (I like this one…), and on this blog.
read the post »Via Language Hat, a Cajun French-English glossary for the students at Louisiana State University. I only regret that they don’t use IPA for the phonetic transcription. The system they do use is, frankly, unusable (except maybe for speakers of a particular variety of American English, which they don’t further specify).
read the post »If you give turn the control of your midi sequencer over to half a dozen of hamsters (in a way that understands hamster movement language, of course), the result sounds like this (mp3). Via Boing Boing.
read the post »The question of whether there will be a linguistic and, ultimately, intellectual dominance of English and English-language research and culture is a vast one. A small contribution to a transatlantic (virtual) dialogue between Jean-Noël Jeanneney, the directer of the French National Library and Mark Liberman, professor of linguistics, at Language Log.
This post (in French) is partly based on the way this issue is framed on the European side of the Atlantic. Re-reading the English commentaries on the web, it occurs to me that the mistranslation of défi(er) by defy (instead of challenge) in the article title has rather wide-ranging consequences. Mr Jeanneney’s goals are by no means in conflict with Google’s indexing of anglophone libraries. His article draws on the presuppositions that characterise the current state of this debate in France, and are not at all directed at or against anyone but French public and political opinion.
Il est légèrement embarrassant d’être aiguillée vers un article du Monde (un point de vue de Jean-Noël Jeanneney) en lisant un blog anglophone. Indépendamment de l’opinion exprimée par Mark Liberman, je le trouve plutôt rassurant de constater que le sujet n’intéresse pas que les français ou autres européens. La question du multilinguisme sur la toile […]
read the post »L’anglais n’a pas d’expression qui correspond au choix cornélien français (l’allemand non plus, d’ailleurs), mais il y en a une pour un choix entre quelque chose de peu satisfaisant et rien du tout : c’est un choix de Hobson, d’après un monsieur qui louait des chevaux en instistant que ses clients soit prennent le cheval le plus près de la porte, soit partent bredouille.
Certains anglophones ont ressenti un manque, une sorte de trou lexical, et se sont mis a appeller choix hobbésien les situations de choix où, par la nature même de l’alternative posée, on est toujours perdant.
Deux problèmes : la référence au philosophe Hobbes n’est pas claire, et phonétiquement, les deux sont trop proches pour que Hobson laisse une place à Hobbes.
Erreur ou innovation lexicale ? De toute façon, les accusations d’illettrisme fusent.
Mark Liberman’s Language Log entry on Hobbesian/Hobson’s choice reminds me of this recent thread on the ADS-L mailing list, which discussed the same topic: Arnold Zwicky presented a collection of examples which employ Hobbesian choice deliberately, to denote “a bad choice, between two unacceptable alternatives”. Hobbesian, though, is typically interpreted as an error, and accusations […]
read the post »Launching a new project of the calibre of the Eggcorn Database — modest as it is in the greater scheme of internet things, certainly increased my stress levels. Suddenly there are registered users and opinionated commenters (not to mention technical glitches). So I have been fighting feelings inadequacy and anxiety about potentially disappointing the […]
read the post »See my collection of language-related blogs and sites, or a list of free-of-charge online dictionaries I recommend.
© 2004-2006 Chris Waigl. The blog posts, except for material attributed to third parties, are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 France License.
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