Two and Red
My job status will be changing in a few days. Not exciting, not terrifying, merely an opportunity to fulfill some male fantasies of mine. Along those lines, I decided it was time to start my own (small) open source project, something that appeals to my testicular need to build things from the ground up.
The problem seemed simple at first: the project is called wordinary: a cross-language, public domain, word-tionary–no definitions, just words (free morphemes, if I have the terminology correct) accompanied by a simple interface that allows for quick retrieval of multiple languages with a single query. Kind of like a Rosetta Stone, although I doubt I will ever create something remotely as useful as the real thing.
Self deprecation aside, looking at one of the ISO language definition standards, I chose a subset of languages for the prototype:
Arabic, German, English, French, Hebrew, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Nederlands, Portuguese, Pashto, Russian, Somali, Spanish, Swedish, and Chinese
and two words to populate the initial database:
the number ‘two‘
the color ‘red’
From here, let the fun (no sarcasm intended) begin: learning to deal with Unicode (UTF-8); using the Python I’ve learned for something constructive; learning to ask for help.
I spoke to a linguist this morning at a great coffee shop (Firefly) in Santa Cruz. After speaking to her, I realized what an idiotic, suicidal project this is. Fine, I’ve done dumber things, and have succeeded at even dumber things that are not worth mentioning here. This would be a crazy project worth succeeding at.
So I ask for help, those of you who read this blog. I knew I would need to turn this into a wiki like project in the future, but I didn’t think the future was here already.
I need help translating the following:
The number ‘two’ in:
Japanese
Korean
Pashto
Somali
The color ‘red’ in:
Korean
Pashto
Somali
I’m also looking for bilingual speakers of these languages, preferably those who speak English and one of the languages I’m listed above… but I’m getting a bit ahead of myself.
And, if you are willing to help with my translation of ‘two’ and ‘red’, just copy the characters into a comment field within this post. If you understand Unicode or UTF-8, I’ll also gladly take the string of UTF-8 codes for these words in the comments of this post.
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