UNILANG WIKI.

January 20, 2005 by 7 Comments

The UniLang Wiki is “a database of language- and linguistic-related information which anyone can easily edit online.” Unfortunately, you don’t seem to be able to do much else but edit; if you try to go to most pages, you get “You have to login to edit pages.” (Note to Unilangers: the verb is “log in,” two words.) But it looks like an interesting project and they have quite a list of languages, so I thought I’d mention it.

Comments

  1. Laurent says
    January 20, 2005 at 8:48 pm

    If interested in a site about languages I would suggest http://www.rosettaproject.org
    It is open to anyone who is willing to document rare (and not so rare) languages…

  2. Jean says
    January 21, 2005 at 9:06 am

    Bless you for the remark about loggingin. I think it’s a lost battle though – I’m absolutely the only person I know who distinguishes between ‘I go on line’ and ‘this is an online service’, even the professors of communication with whom I work write ‘I go online’!

  3. Qov says
    January 21, 2005 at 11:38 am

    At the dawn of onlineness it was always written as two words, be it noun, verb or adjective. Some of the earliest online folk were librarians, who used online services for searching. In library literature the move from “on line searching” to “online searching” was a conscious and deliberately propagated one, to make the word a unique searchable term.
    You can’t defeat librarians (especially not at Trivial Pursuit) but even without that force of agglomeration it’s hard to stop two words always used together becoming one. I remember when “highschool” was a bizarre abomination.

  4. language hat says
    January 21, 2005 at 11:46 am

    I have no problem with “online”; the same transition has happened with “baseball” and a zillion other words. Verbs are different; they don’t get jammed together like substantives. You can write “logon function” if you like, and it won’t bother me, but if you write “Please logon” I don’t like it one bit.

  5. Andrew Dunbar says
    January 22, 2005 at 7:29 pm

    I’m both a pedant and a pedant-hater. This time I must side with LH until phrases like “he logins”, “I loginned yesterday”, “I have always logined”, or “I don’t like loginning” also become commonplace (-:

  6. geoff says
    January 27, 2005 at 8:55 pm

    Oops, it has been corrected to “log in” now. Actually it was a default entry that came with the software.
    Unfortunately we had to disable anonymous editing because Chinese spammers were getting too annoying, but UniLang membership is completely free and getting an account on the Wiki doesn’t take 10 seconds. Also the Wiki is just one part of UniLang, you can see more at http://www.unilang.org
    About logging on: I was recently asked about the difference between “to log on” and “to log in”, any ideas?
    geoff

  7. Leif says
    May 31, 2005 at 5:41 pm

    Bah! Language evolves, sometimes in interesting ways, sometimes in anoying ways. No living language is static, especially not English.
    Leif

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