Linguistic resources you wish actually existed

[alice]

Fire away!

To start with: concise but complete equivalents of annotated sound-change files for all European languages...

[dhok]

A textbook of Nuxalk.

[Qwynegold]

A document (in English) that explains Breton orthography well, or an English-Breton online dictionary where they indicate the pronunciation in IPA.

[Matt]

A modern, thorough reference grammar of Cayuga.

There's information out there, but most of it is fifty years old and not much of it deals satisfactorily with the phonology.

[Aurora Rossa]

An overview of proto-World with explanations of how its daughters evolved into current language families (extremely unlikely compared to yours, but certainly something I wish existed).

[linguoboy]

A first-rate Welsh-English desk dictionary. As it stands, you have cheesy little pocket dictionaries (in both print and online form) that are little better than glorified wordlists and the Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru and literally nothing in-between. I actually have a Welsh-Catalan online dictionary that I resort to sometimes because it's better than what I can find in English.

[Yng]

A first-rate Welsh-English desk dictionary. As it stands, you have cheesy little pocket dictionaries (in both print and online form) that are little better than glorified wordlists and the Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru and literally nothing in-between. I actually have a Welsh-Catalan online dictionary that I resort to sometimes because it's better than what I can find in English.

Y Geiriadur Mawr is reasonably good, although largely as you say a glorified wordlist. The Pocket Modern Colloquial Welsh Dictionary, edited by Gareth King, is good for most things you'll ever need. Also handy to have around for equivalents of some phrases which aren't quite idioms but won't necessarily line up with their English equivalents is Welsh Phrases for Learners (although despite trying it falls massively short of any kind of comprehensive dictionary and gives over too much of its space, IMO, to).

Personally I would like all reference grammars to compulsorily include interlinear glossing and transliteration and be easily available online. I don't want to have to learn a whole new alphabet just to find out, I dunno, how Biblical Hebrew handles relative clauses or whatever.

[linguoboy]

Y Geiriadur Mawr is reasonably good, although largely as you say a glorified wordlist.

YGM sucks ass. It has a lot of words--including a shitpile of archaicisms you're likely to run across in older poetry--but it gives you no help at all with morphosyntax. I can't remember if it even tells you which verbs are transitive, much less what the associated prepositions are, and there are no usage examples or idioms.

The Pocket Modern Colloquial Welsh Dictionary, edited by Gareth King, is good for most things you'll ever need.

I don't think I've seen this one. Does it really have those features you'd expect of any bilingual modern usage dictionary?

I used to have this sort of trouble a lot with Chinese/English bilingual dictionaries, too, but they've gotten a lot better recently.

[chris_notts]

Fire away!

To start with: concise but complete equivalents of annotated sound-change files for all European languages...

Forget concise. What I really, really want is a series of amazingly in-depth studies about the impact and context of various sound changes in different languages. Knowing that a particular language underwent the sound change p -> h / # _, say, is not particularly helpful in and of itself, without knowing the impact of the change on the frequency and distribution of contrasts (how often did p occur initially? and h? ...), the extent to which new homonyms were created, how morphological contrasts were affected etc.

I personally find the kind of sound change lists in the Correspondence Library frustratingly lacking in detail.

[Yng]

Y Geiriadur Mawr is reasonably good, although largely as you say a glorified wordlist.

YGM sucks ass. It has a lot of words--including a shitpile of archaicisms you're likely to run across in older poetry--but it gives you no help at all with morphosyntax. I can't remember if it even tells you which verbs are transitive, much less what the associated prepositions are, and there are no usage examples or idioms.

The newest variation has quite a lot of idioms in it, though you're right about preposition usage (I seem to remember the newest version also has the root in the dictionary entry, which older ones don't IIRC - although you can always check that on geiriadur.net). I also have a copy of Gramadeg y Gymraeg, though, which has a whole section on verbs and associated prepositions.

The Pocket Modern Colloquial Welsh Dictionary, edited by Gareth King, is good for most things you'll ever need.

I don't think I've seen this one. Does it really have those features you'd expect of any bilingual modern usage dictionary?

I used to have this sort of trouble a lot with Chinese/English bilingual dictionaries, too, but they've gotten a lot better recently.

Surprisingly enough, yes. It has example sentences with almost all words and disambiguating numbered bits, if you know what I mean - like 'to run' 1) to move rapidly 2) 'to administrate', etc (poor definitions there but you know what I mean). Also it gives translations of phrasal verbs under a specific verb's entry - next to 'get' you have 'get on', 'get off', 'get to', and so on. It's a pity it's not wider in scope, but it's certainly a good start.

[Grimalkin]

An excellent resource on Proto-Sino-Tibetan, on par with some of the resources on PIE that are out there.

Of course, this isn't gonna happen for a long, long time...

[Ser]

A dictionary from any major language into Standard Arabic that is actually good for students of Arabic. Any.

The majority of them are geared towards Arabic-speaking students of English, lacking things so basic like verbal nouns, prepositions used with verbs (have I mentioned it has phrasal verbs like English?), the vowel used in the stem of the imperfect (or the perfect if it uses the imperfect as the citation form), sometimes even broken plurals for nouns.

The best I've found is Larousse's French-Arabic dictionary (freely available online too!), but even that is lacking verbal nouns (though blissfully having all other things), and it has archaisms and old distinctions not really maintained in the modern written language. The online version also interprets every ـلا as "لا" for some weird reason, so words like ملاك appear as "م‌لاك", which is just visually disgusting.

Also: a grammar that actually explains the different tense/aspects in Arabic, instead of blatantly ignoring the analogical constructions with كان. I'd really want to see an analysis of يفعل vs. يكون يفعل vs. هو فاعل, etc.

I used to have this sort of trouble a lot with Chinese/English bilingual dictionaries, too, but they've gotten a lot better recently.

What in particular would you recommend?

[linguoboy]

I used to have this sort of trouble a lot with Chinese/English bilingual dictionaries, too, but they've gotten a lot better recently.

What in particular would you recommend?

The new Oxford is particularly good, even if I hate the simplified characters.

[Ser]

I used to have this sort of trouble a lot with Chinese/English bilingual dictionaries, too, but they've gotten a lot better recently.

What in particular would you recommend?

The new Oxford is particularly good, even if I hate the simplified characters.

And the English-Chinese section doesn't have any pīnyīn.

Though I just found out the online edition in September (EDIT: November, I can't read) will!

Coming to OLDO in November 2011: Pinyin will be added to all Chinese translations, helping English speakers to know how to pronounce them.

Source: http://www.oup.com/oldo/whatsnew/

[----]

A Georgian dictionary that gives the Masdar form of verbs as well as the actual root(s).

[roninbodhisattva]

A up-to-modern-standards Reference Grammar of (some/any form of) Vulgar Latin based on field work by a time traveling linguist.

[ná'oolkiłí]

Juicy, modern grammars of Laz, Svan, and Mingrelian.

A Georgian dictionary that gives the Masdar form of verbs as well as the actual root(s).

The Rayfield (2006) Comprehensive dictionary lists masdars, 2nd person future forms, and IIRC 2nd person present forms, which is really helpful. But, yeah, roots would be nice =T

[äreo]

More (and better) data from Anglophone and Francophone countries relating to dialectal differences.
More movies dubbed in Russian and Polish that don't just have one guy doing a voice-over.
Good, long books on Võro, Marshallese, Nauruan, Rotuman, Kiribati, all of the Ryukyuan languages, Yélî Dnye, Comanche, and linguistic variation in 19th-century English, French, German, and Japanese.

[Drydic]

Complete reference grammars of Illyrian, Thracian, and Phrygian, with accompanying dictionaries.

[Xephyr]

A descriptive grammar of Xhosa that doesn't feel like it's gonna collapse into dust when I pick it up because it was printed in the 40s and is nowadays in shorter supply than the California condor.

[TaylorS]

A grammar of Ancient Egyptian that actually has the vowels (the real vowels, not the fake ones you see in the common transliterations), Oh and a complete history of Egyptian's phonology and grammar from the earliest attestations to modern Coptic.

[Izambri]

A grammar of the Minoan language, with etymologies, its relation to Aegean and Thyrsenian languages and a lexicon. In two volumes, hardcover.

[linguoboy]

Oh and a complete history of Egyptian's phonology and grammar from the earliest attestations to modern Coptic.

You mean something along the lines of Loprieno's Ancient Egyptian but heftier?

[Lyhoko Leaci]

No one's though of this yet?

How about an alien (or future, or magical, the specifics of how it works doesn't matter) device that contains information on every language that ever existed, and you simply have to hold it and think about what you want it to show (say, sound changes from X to Y, a full descriptive grammar on Ancient Egyptian, info on Proto-World, if it exits, at least, [if it doesn't, it would give the closest thing to it or something] anything you want, as long as it is language related) and it will show it, with annotations if you want them, or focused on a certain part if that is what you want. Oh, and conlangs are included as well, provided they have been made before you search for them. (If they are incomplete, that will be noted and only the parts that have been created will be shown, possibly with notes on stuff that not even the creator of the conlang is sure if it is correct. Basically, a warning that certain info may not be correct, there are multiple possibilities, or the language is currently being changed.)

It is compatible with and can be connected to any computer system that can connect to external devices/have external storage that ever existed, or that ever will exist. (But only relevant ports will be accessible. No need to provide a magnetic tape connection system of some sort if you can't use one, after all, or don't even want to use one.) It's also portable, about the size of a kindle, and doesn't run out of power, and is also very durable. The display interface can be also adjusted to what you want by thinking, so it can imitate a book, or act like a web page, or some other form that you think up. Or if you want, it could speak it to you, or download it directly to your brain if you really want it to. And bug-free, so there's no problems.

There something that should satisfy pretty much anyone... hopefully.

[dhok]

^ I'd give half a decade of my life to have one.