> > - "under-resourced language" was introduced in > 2005 by a native English colleague I can't remember the name > of at the moment, to translate the title and description of a > workshop dedicated to NLP for pi-languages at TALN-05.
My feeling is that this term was in use before 2005. For example, Steve Bird, writing in February 2004, gives here (http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000481.html) a nice list of alternative terms including "under-resourced". I think I coined the term "non-indigenous minority language" (NIML) in 1997, which enjoyed a brief period of currency, to cover the idea of a language spoken by a local minority (e.g. Urdu in the UK), but to get away from the predominant association at that time between the term "minority langauge", in Europe at least, and languages like Welsh, Breton and so on. In the USA, the term "low-density language" seemed to be prevalent: I first came across it at the 1998 AMTA conference, in the title of Jones and Havrilla's paper. In their paper they gloss "low density" as "languages of low diffusion", "world minority langauges", ie langauges "for which major online resources are typically not available." As I always liked to point out at that time, one of the world's top 3 languages (in terms of numbers of speakers), namely Hindi-Urdu, was certainly a low-density language in this sense, but not a world minority language; but at least the question of resources was foregrounded by this term. I used the term in a 2001 paper. The term "lesser-studied languages" (sic) was current in 2000, when it was used in the title of a NATO Advanced Study symposium organized by Kemal Oflazer. This list has already discussed (in Feb 2005) the appropriateness or otherwise of "lesser" as opposed to "less", so let's not rerun that one (but as a pernickety native speaker I might point out that a less-spoken language is spoken by fewer, not less, people!) > Last bit of thought: we should be more precise about the term > "language". > For example, "Chinese" is not 1 language, but several (no > oral intercomprehension), with their > dialects: Mandarin, Cantonese, Wu (Shanghainese is a dialect > of Wu), Fujien, etc. Or Arabic, for that matter. And that is Mandarin and Cantonese are mutually non-comprehensible languages, not "dialects". To describe them as dialects of Chinese would be like describing French and German as dialects of European. But it is fairly difficult to be very precise about the term "language". As was famously stated, possibly by Max Weinreich, "A language is a dialect with an army and navy" (though see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_is_a_dialect_with_an_army_and_navy ). Although he was referring to Yiddish, Flemish~Dutch is the example that always springs to my mind. _______________________________________________ Mt-list mailing list
