The Linguistics Research Center (LRC) brings (mostly) dead languages to life. Our website provides lessons for learning to read and understand original documents of 20 historical languages, as well as vocabulary resources for dozens more. These materials remain freely available online for anyone — researchers and enthusiasts alike — interested in ancient languages, their development, and their interconnections with historical and modern societies the world over. Initial materials have focused on the Indo-European family of languages to which English belongs, and projects currently underway will expand our offerings to cover the Semitic languages — including Arabic, Hebrew, Akkadian, and others — as well as long marginalized languages from Mesoamerica, beginning with the Mayan languages. Your support will help speed these projects to completion, furthering our mission to provide scholarly materials for free both to those who may not have easy access to first-class educational institutions, and in particular to the communities represented by the languages we study. In addition, through your donations we will help prepare the next generation of digital scholars, as the undergraduate and graduate students assisting us build their skills and portfolios working on large scale Digital Humanities projects. At its inception half a century ago, the LRC helped pioneer the field of machine translation. Decades later the fruits of this labor still find use in professional translation software. With the advent of the Internet, the LRC again helped lay the foundations of what has become Digital Humanities, applying computational techniques to the understanding of language and the dissemination of linguistic knowledge.
The LRC is currently working toward a dramatic expansion of our lexical offerings. At the same time, we’re continuing to add to our online collection of language lessons. Both of these directions for advancement not only serve a public broadly interested in linguistic and cultural history and evolution, but also provide numerous opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students to participate and build up their skills and portfolios in Digital Humanities. Lexica: Dictionaries Interwoven through an Etymological Core The planned upgrades to IELEX focus on improving and expanding the capabilities of the computational architecture used to create the online resource. This underlying LEX system automatically takes data on individual languages and their etymological relationships and builds it out into a collection of interwoven dictionaries linked through a core etymological dictionary and deployed online for users to peruse. Our current data allows us to build a system focused on the Indo-European languages. But different data will facilitate creation of similar resources for different language families. Two major projects will take us in these new directions. MayaLEX: Interlinked Dictionaries of Early Mayan Languages A grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) currently supports the early stages of collecting data for, and testing the functionality of, a preliminary collection of dictionaries for ancient Mayan languages. We will start with the Colonial Ch’olti’ language, extant in only a couple manuscripts: we will create a complete dictionary of the language, linked to an etymological dictionary where the ancestors of the words are known. Bit by bit, we will add to this initial structure with preliminary data from the Colonial K’iche’ and Kaqchikel languages. Over time, we will expand these dictionaries and add more for other languages in the Mayan family. SemitiLEX: Interlinked Dictionaries of Early Semitic Languages Another language group of critical importance is the Semitic family, containing not only Arabic and Hebrew, but other ancient languages from Ethiopia, Babylonia, and elsewhere. Important documents in Semitic languages include fundamental texts from all the Abrahamic religions. While scholars have pored over these languages for centuries, and they have even produced several online resources, few of them facilitate comparison of the lexical and other linguistic structures among different members of the family, and even fewer help make their vocabularies transparent to non-specialists. The SemitiLEX project has begun the long, but important, task of creating updated dictionaries that both facilitate new and interesting directions of research, and at the same time open up the details and histories of these languages to a wider audience.
The creation of online language materials requires a very particular skillset, combining linguistic knowledge, computational skills, and pedagogical understanding, among other things. Rarely does a particular major or department provide more than superficial acquaintance with more than one of these skills. The LRC therefore places particular emphasis on involving students at all stages of their studies in the process of learning how to plan, craft, deploy, and maintain large-scale Digital Humanities projects. At the same time, some features of a project can become so technical that they require the highly specialized abilities of professional programmers. Your contributions will help us acquire this support and also contribute to maintaining an LRC staff that can translate institutional knowledge and project goals into technical requirements to be implemented by the computational staff. Finally, lessons and dictionaries don’t write themselves. They are not even the product of a single individual. Rather, the dictionary data and lesson content created by specialists in the respective fields must go through a rigorous process of editing and be crafted to meet project aims. Your contributions also support a dedicated staff of content editors and project managers who ensure that scholarly content reaches users in an understandable, engaging, and useful way.
