BAZOMBO: a discursive miscellany of topics

Total linguistic awesomeness

Friday, April 25 2008

Via the marvellous Language Hat, I read about the newly-online World Atlas of Language Structures.

It appears to be a great example of using the web to its fullest, according to this review:

Behind the scenes of any web application is interesting stuff that average users need not worry about, but that is the foundation of usability and extensibility. First a small gold nugget: a downloadable KML file is provided for each page that includes a map. This is a nice touch which really characterizes the great attention to detail that makes using WALS Online such a pleasant experience.

Some sample pages:

• Language page for Te Reo. (Note how the breadcrumb trail at the top is actually an ordered list with CSS formatting).
• Distinguishing ‘finger’ and ‘hand’. Farmers tend to lexically distinguish finger from hand more often than hunter-gatherers. This indicates that agriculturalists typically have more reasons for referring precisely to the finger than do foragers and, consequently, that the finger typically is more distinct for the former than for the latter. What, then, renders the finger more distinct among farmers compared to hunter-gatherers?
• Map of languages by number of genders. (There are languages with more than five genders!)

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Tags: WALS ~ linguistics ~ neat things

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