Summer travel – Part 1

I’m trying to catch up after a long time. It feels a bit odd but let’s see where this will get me.

My holiday this year was short but sweet. I visited Edinburgh to see the exhibition “The Celts” in the National Museum of Scotland but it turned out that Edinburgh had more to show. But more of this in following posts.

The exhibition on the Celts was truly impressive. I thought I knew something about them but the exhibition made me realise there was so much more to learn.

The exhibition features a huge collection of well preserved artefacts. Together with the wealth of information and interpretation provided in the accompanying videos, texts and pictures, the world of Celts felt less romanticized but richer and more mysterious than ever before. And the fact that the meanings of so many representations and symbols found in these objects remain hidden and beyond our comprehension is a truly humbling experience.

National Museum of Denmark It’s difficult to say which of the exhibits impressed me most. The craftsmanship and elegance of the design found in these objects are astonishing. The Gundestrup cauldron, which is on loan from the was full of surprises. The depictions provide evidence for a shared knowledge of the world. Just like the cauldron, most exhibits open up more question than they answer.

The other that I really cannot not mention is the standing stone with the Ogam inscription (borrowed from the British Museum). Again, man’s desire to communicate even if it takes so much effort (try chiselling these marks in stone yourself) is simply astonishing.

I could go on and on about the intricate decorations of The Battersea shield, all the pins and brooches and jars and torcs exhibited. But I won’t go in all the details. Suffice it to say that the exhibition shouldn’t be missed.

Open Ac­cess in Lin­guis­tics

The open access movement has been slow in reaching the linguistics community. However, things are changing. Elsevier, the publisher that made 1,2 billion € in net profit in 2011 (a 6% increase form 2010 in times of financial crisis!) may be publishing English for Specific Purposes, for example, but there are high quality open access journals too (Iberica, Revista de Lengua para Fines Específicos or LSP Journal) and their numbers are increasing.

I’m really glad that things have started to change in the business of publishing open access monographs. Initiated by Ste­fan Müller and Mar­tin Haspel­math, the OALI project aims to publish and store books on linguistics in a digital format (print on demand will be also available by Cre­ate Space and others). The team are planing to use the Creative Commons CC BY copyright, however, translation rights would re­main with the au­thor. OALI is hosted at the Freie Uni­ver­sität Berlin.

The project is in need of donations although they have applied for German state funding (DFG) too. If you support the Open access movement, you can help in different ways: publish a book with them, review books for them, donate money, typesetting, etc., or just tell them you support the project.

To learn more about OALI, visit their website.

Kilgarriff: Getting to know your corpus

“Corpora are not meant to be read,”  Adam Kilgarriff said. How can we learn more about them then? Listen to Adam.

Collins Dictionary Online

The Collins Dictionary is online. For free. Immediately, I wanted to have a look at it and see whether what it offers is any better from what I usually use (Macmillandictionary.com). Just a quick check with suggest.

Collins Online provides information about the word’s frequency (not seen below), pronunciation, grammar category and and definitions of 3 senses with an example each. I’m not sure, however, what is meant by sug’gester (noun) being an alternative form of suggest (verb). It isn’t connected to the entry of sug’gester in Collins either (there’s no such entry in the dictionary) so I just wouldn’t know. This is followed by information on the origin of the word, its synonyms and a link to Thesaurus, translations in a number of languages but not my own (Slovene and Hungarian) and usage examples (which senses are illustrated is not clear). This is a mess.

If I compare this to Macmillan Dictionary’s entry, I must say I prefer the latter. First of all, I like the fact that I can view the shorter or longer version of the entry – depending on my needs. Next, they offer 4 senses with examples that illustrate each sense of the word separately with highlighted patterns of usage. The thesaurus entries are also adjusted to the individual senses of the word. Advice is also given to learners of English about the correct use of the word and alternative ways of conveying the same meaning. And it looks neat.

Collins Online: suggest

Macmillan Dictionary: suggest

The Collins dictionary, however, has something useful that Macmillan doesn’t. Right to the entry, you can see 3 boxes: browse nearby words, suggest photos from Flickr and word usage trends (default: last 10 years) for suggest. While the photos might be useful with some nouns, I don’t see a point in using them with verbs like suggest.  Also, Flickr photos can cause a lot of confusion if they are not selected carefully (check the box for foot). However, since incorporating an image or video is no longer a problem, online dictionaries could easily make better use of multimedia with selected entries.

Macmillan allows you to check the verb forms with a click (Collins does not), but it does not give a list of related words. I think its advertising revenue would not suffer much if a box with related words would replace an advertisement. Also, the box with information on a word’s frequency in the past is a keeper. It helps students put a word’s frequency in perspective. Language changes. Imagine this information was available for each sense of a word or even for its collocates!

All in all, I remain a Macmillan Dictionary fan.

A Happy Public Domain Day!