The Campaign Builder's Guild

As you all may or may not know, I am currently a Linguistics undergrad; as to be expected, I am fascinated by languages in general.  Often, instead of making words up for place and personal names, I like to look them up in various dictionaries around the Internet.

Most people have heard about sites like AltaVista Babelfish and Google Translate, both of which allow you to translate between several major languages.  However, many of these languages are familiar sounding to people, and might not be "different" enough.

My first offering is from the Linguist List's website, which is the resource for linguists, typically for job listings.  On the site, they have a listing of Web Resources, which includes many dictionaries, some monolingual, some bilingual, and some multilingual.

Next up, and also from the Linguist List's website is the MultiTree.  Essentially, it is a database that can show the various hypotheses of languages relation to one another.  A search for English, for example, reveals that it is considered a West Germanic language (along with Afrikaans, Dutch, German and Scots), under the larger Germanic family (which also contains North Germanic langauges, such as Danish, Icelandic, Norwegian, and Swedish, and the extinct East Germanic banch), which ultimately falls under the well-attested Indo-European family.  Even if you aren't that into linguistics, or don't really understand what all this means, it's a fun tool to play around with nonetheless.

Now I'll go back to dictionaries for a minute.  Here are a bunch of my own that I've found around the internet; a few are repeats from the Linguist List's Web Resources page, but I'll post them here anyway.

*

A Tocharian-English database; not always reliable. unfortunately.
*A Sumerian-English database, including pictures of cuneiform.
*An Irish-English dictionary, including selected verb conjugations.
*An Armenian-English dictionary, Armenian is left in the Armenian alphabet.
*Words, a Latin-English dictionary, which can look fully declined and conjugated words up.
*Jim Breen's WWWJDIC, an invaluable resource for Japanese; includes both a regular Japanese-English dictionary, a 2 Kanji (Chinese character) dictionaries (one general, one by radicals), cellphone interfaces, and more.
*A Hawai'ian-English dictionary; probably the best one on the Internet, even includes Proto-Polynesian roots for many words.
*A Russian-English database; Russian words are in Cyrillic.
*An Uyghur-English dictionary; Uyghur words are in a Cyrillic script, a Latin script, and an Arabic script.[/list]

Last but not least, the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).  The IPA is a script that can represent sounds in any language on a one-for-one basis.  I've talked about it before, but I think the best way to let people learn about it is this site, which shows the complete IPA charts and, using Flash, lets you listen to each individual sound, as well as giving descriptions when you hover over the names of the columns and rows.  Also of note is X-SAMPA, an ASCII version of IPA which allows for easy use without having to find and input the individual IPA characters and diacritics.  Fonts, as well as various other IPA-related links can be found at the bottom of the IPA page.

That's all for me, so share your stuff too, guys.

Quote from: limetomI am fascinated by languages in general

Me too. :D

Just wait, soon you won't be content to looking up words and adapting them, and you'll start making up a language instead. If it hasn't happened already... :P

That IPA sound site is really great, though it did give me giggling fits listening to the guy ever-so-seriously making funny noises. Even the most respectable phoneme is reduced to the category of "funny noise" when it's so completely out of context, mind you. ;)

Damnit, Limetom. You got all mine already.

Apart from Langmaker, that is. But that's not SO much resources, although there are some handy explanations of linguistic terminology in there.