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posted by chromas on Friday November 15 2019, @04:40PM   Printer-friendly
from the cc-by dept.

Global Voices has an interview with Ranjana Chopra, head of a special department in the state government of Odisha, India. The state of Odisha, India, has published dictionaries in the state's 21 indigenous languages under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License [CC BY]. These are tri-lingual dictionaries which translate to and from the selected indigenous language and English and the local official langage, Odia. Some of the languages are spoken by as few as 8,000 people in the state.

In 2018, the government of the Indian state of Odisha published 21 dictionaries in the state's 21 provincial indigenous languages. The dictionaries were developed in collaboration with native-speaking communities for planned implementation in multilingual primary education programs. The trilingual dictionaries, with indigenous language translations into English and Odia (the official language of Odisha), have been uploaded in August 2019 for public use in an online education portal managed by the government.

On October 17, all the dictionaries were relicensed by online education portal Odisha Virtual Academy under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Earlier on SN:
850 New Words in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary (2018)


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850 New Words in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary 23 comments

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

The language doesn't take a vacation, and neither does the dictionary. The words we use are constantly changing in big ways and small, and we're here to record those changes. Each word has taken its own path in its own time to become part of our language—to be used frequently enough by some in order to be placed in a reference for all. If you're likely to encounter a word in the wild, whether in the news, a restaurant menu, a tech update, or a Twitter meme, that word belongs in the dictionary.

[...] In recent years, the richest source of these newly adopted foreign-language words has been the world of food-or, perhaps we should say: the food of the world.

[...] The sometimes perplexing domain of digital financial exchanges opens a window into a subject that requires explanation for many of us, hence the detailed definition of cryptocurrency

[...] Health care, both physical and psychological, gives us many new words as well. Neoadjuvant refers to treatment for a disease or condition that is administered before the primary treatment in order to improve the likelihood of a successful outcome

Source: The Dictionary Just Got a Whole Lot Bigger (archive, because "adblocker" is not their favorite word)


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  • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 15 2019, @04:49PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 15 2019, @04:49PM (#920718)

    Your dictionary have virus

  • (Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Friday November 15 2019, @05:12PM (3 children)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Friday November 15 2019, @05:12PM (#920723) Journal

    It's a new Rosetta Stone.

    Never heard of the Attribution 4.0 International license:

    https://creativecommons.org/faq/#what-are-the-international-unported-creative-commons-licenses-and-why-does-cc-offer-ported-licenses [creativecommons.org]

    One of CC’s goals is ensuring that all of its legal tools work globally, so that anyone anywhere in the world can share their work on globally standard terms. To this end, CC offers a core suite of six international copyright licenses (formerly called the “unported”) that are drafted based largely on various international treaties governing copyright, taking into account as many jurisdiction-specific legal issues as possible. The latest version (4.0) has been drafted with particular attention to the needs of international enforceability.

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    • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 15 2019, @06:02PM (2 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 15 2019, @06:02PM (#920736)

      It's a sad day when a dictionary has any type of copyright attached. Who's going to steal a word and profit from it?

      • (Score: 2) by RamiK on Friday November 15 2019, @06:13PM

        by RamiK (1813) on Friday November 15 2019, @06:13PM (#920738)

        Who's going to steal a word and profit from it?

        Depending on your definition of "steal", most trademark owners.

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      • (Score: 2) by Pino P on Friday November 15 2019, @07:25PM

        by Pino P (4721) on Friday November 15 2019, @07:25PM (#920768) Journal

        Ideas are explicitly not copyrightable. The most common translation of a simple word, such as Italian or Spanish casa meaning English "house," isn't copyrightable either because the law considers the idea and expression to have merged. But the exact explanation of a term with a complex and nuanced meaning, such as words on clickbait sites' lists of alleged "words that don't translate," can certainly qualify as an original work of authorship. So is the selection of which words to include or not, which is one key difference between a dictionary and a telephone directory (Feist v. Rural).

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Friday November 15 2019, @06:42PM

    by bzipitidoo (4388) on Friday November 15 2019, @06:42PM (#920751) Journal

    An American dictionary printed in 1948 had some interesting definitions. I had no idea a dictionary could be anything other than strictly factual, until I saw these whoppers. "Masturbate" was a real short entry: "self-pollution". That's it. It also had an entry for "yellow peril", and the definition was xenophobic and racist to the max. No doubt they were still worked up over WWII. Various religious terms were heavily biased toward Christian theology.

  • (Score: 2) by darkfeline on Friday November 15 2019, @09:28PM

    by darkfeline (1030) on Friday November 15 2019, @09:28PM (#920809) Homepage

    When I think of dictionaries, I think of the show Fune wo Amu. The English title is The Great Passage which is a travesty. "Fune wo Amu" means "To Weave a Boat". Individuals are like islands stranded across a great sea, and dictionaries provide the boats that allow us to reach each other, the words that allow us to understand each other.

    One piece of trivia mentioned in the show is that the Japanese government does not endorse an official dictionary, because language should be owned by the people (remember Newspeak?).

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by gawdonblue on Friday November 15 2019, @09:33PM (1 child)

    by gawdonblue (412) on Friday November 15 2019, @09:33PM (#920811)

    Would be great if all indigenous languages were given similar treatment.

    Related- Many schools in Australia are beginning to have classes in the local tongue and it's working to bring communities together.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 15 2019, @10:35PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 15 2019, @10:35PM (#920822)

      Incidentally, this state contains significant area of so-called "tribal" settlement - hill peoples who have not been assimilated into Hindu caste system. Adding their languages to the dictionary would be a remarkable feat.

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