Linguistic resources you wish actually existed

[Yng]

If Even is the same as Evenki, incidentally, I have a grammar. In English.

It is of the same family, Northern Tungusic, but not the same language.

Are they actually that different?

[Jetboy]

What I would find quite nice would be translations into more modern English of English texts written before, shall we say, 1900; having read Studies in Words over the summer, today's session with The Scarlet Letter left me feeling like I was probably misreading huge swathes of text.

[TaylorS]

What I would find quite nice would be translations into more modern English of English texts written before, shall we say, 1900; having read Studies in Words over the summer, today's session with The Scarlet Letter left me feeling like I was probably misreading huge swathes of text.

I generally have no problem reading anything written after 1750, but that could be because I have a very large vocabulary.

[Mecislau]

An English grammar and reader of the Even language complete with recordings.

I'm 90% sure I do have a grammar outline (~40 pages) of Even in English (and 100% sure of one in Russian), but I won't be able to give it to you until I get my laptop back from the shop...

[Eyowa]

Oh, and I want a grammar of Pirahã.

I actually have that somewhere.

Do you recall who it's by? Or what the title is? I've searched for "Pirahã Grammar" but all I've found is Everett's "Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã" and Don't Sleep, There are Snakes.

But what I really want is the (purely hypothetical) best possible description of Pirahã, not Everett's description. I guess I can dream...

[tezcatlip0ca]

What I would find quite nice would be translations into more modern English of English texts written before, shall we say, 1900; having read Studies in Words over the summer, today's session with The Scarlet Letter left me feeling like I was probably misreading huge swathes of text.

I generally have no problem reading anything written after 1750, but that could be because I have a very large vocabulary.

Seconded.

[Gulliver]

A collection of shot English recordings in different dialects which don't require you to use them in their entirety because the owner is a jobsworthy douche. I just want to isolate one or two sentences… but no, they "don't allow that kind of editing".

How hard does it have to be to find one or two sentence recordings?

[Jetboy]

What I would find quite nice would be translations into more modern English of English texts written before, shall we say, 1900; having read Studies in Words over the summer, today's session with The Scarlet Letter left me feeling like I was probably misreading huge swathes of text.

I generally have no problem reading anything written after 1750, but that could be because I have a very large vocabulary.

Seconded.

No, I can too, but I notice that I ignore some words completely because I don't see how they fit into the text and it makes sense without them, and I'm probably reading things into words that wouldn't have been read in by a contemporary audience, and vice versa.

[Ser]

A collection of shot English recordings in different dialects which don't require you to use them in their entirety because the owner is a jobsworthy douche. I just want to isolate one or two sentences… but no, they "don't allow that kind of editing".

How hard does it have to be to find one or two sentence recordings?

Have you tried asking for them at linguistics forums? ¬¬ (The ZBB, the CBB, Unilang, Omniglot, lingforum... maybe even the CONLANG list.)

[Skomakar'n]

A verb appendix for Modern Greek, showing all inflections of all irregular or slightly irregular verbs.

[hadad]

Something that show's the tendacies of certain sounds to evolve into other sounds, and not just sound change laws in PIE.

Something on PUralic, PKartvelian, and PAfrasian. I know the previous two lines probably exist already, I just haven't happened accrossed them yet. I'm still a noob.


A dictionary of every root and affix of every proto language and ancient isolates like Elamite, Urartian, and Sumerian.

Something in english about Hattian and Urartian grammar. I didn't plan on taking Russian, until I wanted to find linguistic resources for Urartian. Luckily I needed a slavic language and am as big into linguistics as I am. i've got alot of my plate. I'm still hammerinng out spanish, japanese, and Sumerian.

[Gulliver]

A collection of shot English recordings in different dialects which don't require you to use them in their entirety because the owner is a jobsworthy douche. I just want to isolate one or two sentences… but no, they "don't allow that kind of editing".

How hard does it have to be to find one or two sentence recordings?

Have you tried asking for them at linguistics forums? ¬¬ (The ZBB, the CBB, Unilang, Omniglot, lingforum... maybe even the CONLANG list.)

I asked around here actually, and a few other forums… and got one response.

BUT if anyone would like to help me…

It will take a whole two minutes. All I want you to do is record yourself (on your phone or computer) answering the following questions:

How old are you?
Where are you from?
Where do you live now?
What's your party trick? (I can lick my elbow, etc)
What's the silliest way you've ever hurt/injured yourself? (I put my back out dancing around the bathroom etc)
Have any of your relatives done anything weird or wonderful? (My brother was in a Bollywood film)

And then email me the recording gogogulliver (à) gmail.com.

[Terra]

I want an absolute, final, definitive, and complete grammar of Sindarin. Sometimes I want to walk to beat Tolkien's bones out of frustration of his whimsicality and capriciousness.

[Herr Dunkel]

Oh, and I want a grammar of Pirahã.

I actually have that somewhere.

Do you recall who it's by? Or what the title is? I've searched for "Pirahã Grammar" but all I've found is Everett's "Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã" and Don't Sleep, There are Snakes.

But what I really want is the (purely hypothetical) best possible description of Pirahã, not Everett's description. I guess I can dream...

Actually, I think I have a PDF but I don't know where I put it. It's very fleshy, 400+ pages with cultural and grammatical info together.

[Hwunitum]

Good Nahuatl sources: dictionary, grammer, thesaurus and etymology

J. Richard Andrewsʻs grammar is good although a tad confusingly written.

[äreo]

Sound changes to Nauruan and Marshallese from Proto-Austronesian

[Nannalu]

A complete grammar of Palauan,
A cheap version of Ket grammar,
A book on the philosophy and complete grammar of Ithkuil,
Grammar of Yucatec Maya*
__________
* If anyone knows of one of these, hit me up ♥

[Ser]

Grammar of Yucatec Maya*
__________
* If anyone knows of one of these, hit me up ♥

C'mon, try googling that at least.

[ná'oolkiłí]

A cheap version of Ket grammar

I'm almost done with Stephan Georg's Descriptive Grammar of Ket (from my library, so free). It's not very well written (organization is lacking, even the juiciest morphological peculiarities are presented very dryly), but it has given me a lot of conlanging ideas. What's your interest in Ket?

[Skomakar'n]

A verb appendix for Modern Greek, showing all inflections of all irregular or slightly irregular verbs.

I guess I could follow up on this by saying that I would really like someone to set up a Modern Greek section at Verbix.
I'd be happy to fill in the verbs I know myself, if that would yield the interest for others to fill in the rest for me...

[Ser]

Same for Arabic.

There's absolutely no good online verb conjugator.

[Bunnycatch3r]

A site like boardgamegeek.com for conlanguages. Ideally, this would be a place where conlangs are discussed, reviewed, given a ranking, and awarded.

[MisterBernie]

Ideally, this would be a place where conlangs are discussed, reviewed, given a ranking, and awarded.

How could that go wrong!

[Bunnycatch3r]

Ideally, this would be a place where conlangs are discussed, reviewed, given a ranking, and awarded.

How could that go wrong!

Ok, the ranking part is a bit much. I like how board games are ranked for different categories over at bgg and thought it might be interesting to see something like that take place with languages. However, it is time that languages are evaluated for recognition~ something akin to the Nebula, the Spiel Des Jahres, or The Golden Globe.

[jmcd]

They do kind of get evaluated - there are the ZBB Awards at the end of the year.