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Showing posts from September, 2017

Linguistic map making: Drawing polygons

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Hedvig has written o n how Ethnologue has become even more restricted than it already was , and what resources are out there that could be used instead. One of the things I miss from Ethnologue are its maps - although at least recently it was still possible to access most of these, by downloading them instead of viewing them on your browser. In her post, Hedvig points out that Langscape can be used instead, and that's all great. But what if you wanted to draw a map yourself? Especially one which you intend to publish? Some institutions may have access to the World Language Mapping System  (WLMS), which lies at the core of Ethnologue's (and Langscape's) maps, and was made by Global Mapping International ( which recently was closed, and now the WLMS is back formally with SIL ). I'm not sure about the details (and the user agreement parts of the WLMS website are down), but paying a lot of money for the WLMS must enable users to draw their own maps and publish them, as

Public service announcement: list of databases and more

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Public service announcement: there are website that keep a well-curated list of things that are useful to linguistics researchers and students, including the following: Language Goldmine - catalogue of cross-linguistic databases Linguistic terminology (us here at HWRG) Platinum Open Access publishing in linguistics More Open Access Linguistics  (us here at HWRG) Online tutorials for linguistic tools (ELAN, R etc)  (also HWRG) free online PDFs of publicly available grammars  (ALT) Language universals Weird things in langauge (Rara & Rarissima) CALS (Conlang WALS) It would appear that some don't know about these lists, so now you know/are reminded :). Lists are good, and instead of reinventing them you can look through these and add to them. For more hopefully useful stuff like this, go here.