Project Title: A World Wide Web of Comparative Linguistics

Project Overview: The goal of this project is to develop a visual interface that displays a map of the world and allows the user to input a desired word in an available language and interactively view the etymological history of that word displayed visually on the map.

Sumário de Projeto: O objetivo deste projeto é criar um interface visual que tem um mapa do mundo e permite que o usuário entra uma palavra numa lingua e interativamente ve a história etimológica dessa palavra no mapa.

There are several objectives to this project:

Tem alguns objetivos deste projeto:
  1. developing an intuitive visual interface for displaying etymological information to non-linguists in an entertaining yet educational way

    criar uma interface visual e intuitiva para mostrar a informação etimológica aos usuários que não são lingüistas numa manera divertida e ainda educacional
  2. increasing a sense of global connectedness by showing how languages are intertwined with one another

    aumentar o sentido do coneção no mundo pela demonstração de dependências entre varias linguas
  3. discovering the best techniques for describing to a computer database how words in different languages are connected to one another

    descobrir as técnicas melhores para descrever a um base de dados como é que as palavras nas varias linguas são conectadas
  4. realizing the most efficient method for storing words and discovering connections

    achar o método mais eficiente para armazenar palavras/relaçãos e descobrir conexãos


Sample Project Display:

Exemplo de Interface:


Example of User Experience: After inputting “pass” in English, the system would draw an arrow from England to France, which would display “passer,” and then to Italy, which would display “passus.” Mousing over any word would display information on its meaning and language (e.g. “Latin,” and “step” for “passer”). By clicking on a word from one of the non-modern languages and choosing the "Find Descendants option", the system would then find all words that derived from that word. For example, clicking on the Latin “passus” would then show the user that the Spanish word “paso” and that another English word “pace” were derived from it. The user would then realize that modern-day “pace” and “paso” share a related meaning because of their common ancestor, and can be called cognates, “words or morphemes related by derivation, borrowing, or descent.” An extension to the system could include a button that would force the system to automatically search for and display all the possible cognates to the user (with or without the derivational links).

Exemplo da Experiência do Usuário: Depois de entrar "pass" em ingles, o sistema desenha um seta de Ingleterra a Franca, mostra "passer," e então desenha um seta de Franca a Italia, e mostra "passus." Um usuário pode ver informação sobre o significado e lingua por cliquar numa palavra mostrado (e.g. lingua: "Latin," significado: "step," por cliquar sobre "passer"). Por cliquar sobre uma palavra de uma lingua antigua e escolher a a opção "Find Descendants (Encontra Descendentes)," o sistema mostra todas as palavras derivadas dessa palavra (até econtra as palavras modernas sem descendentes). Por exemplo, se um usuário cliqua na "passus" de Latin, o sistema então mostra a usuário que a "paso" de Espanhol e que a "pace" de Ingles derivou-se de "passus." O usuário então se da conta do que as modernas palavras "pace" e "paso" tem um significado similar por causa do antepassado comum, e se podem considerar cognatos, "palavras o morfemos relacionados por derivação, empréstimo, o descida." Uma extensão ao sistema pode incluir uma opção que faria o sistema procurar automaticamente e mostrar todos os cognatos possíveis de uma palavra moderna (com o sem arcos).


Related Work: There have been several attempts at creating interactive etymological databases (see Related Link #1), but most of them are designed for the technical crowd, aren’t very user friendly, and don’t display the information visually.
ThinkMap has come up with a interactive and visual tool for displaying meaning relatedness between words in the English language (see Related Link #2). Though my proposed system may seem like the same tool but with etymological information instead of meaning information, it adds atleast 2 more dimensions of meaning to the visual interface by incorporating a map (word:location relation) and arrows (parent:child relation).
So from my survey of the current research, I have concluded that my proposed system would be a novel tool and that its development would provide valuable insights.


Resources: To create a successful demo, I'll need to locate etymological databases and convert all of those to one consistent format. I have found a number of databases available for download online (see Related Link #1), and they should be substantial enough for a good demo.


Related Links:

  1. “Tower of Babel: An Etymological Database Project” http://starling.rinet.ru/
    A website with free downloads of etymological databases and of Starling, software developed “for various types of linguistic text and database processing, operations with linguistic databases and Internet presentation of linguistic data.”

  2. “The Visual Thesaurus”http://www.visualthesaurus.com/
    An interactive visual interface that lets user discover words related by synonymy and antonymy to their inputted word, and follow a trail of related concepts. This is not related to etymology, but it’s a relevant related work because of its success in making linguistic information interactive and fun to explore for the user, and because it must have an efficient system for storing the relations between words and searching out the related words quickly.