blog

Jono’s recently been thinking about how to get users involved with aside from programming, and he decided to put the textual content of Ubiquity’s builtin commands and the new interactive tutorial on the wiki for all to edit.

• Command documentation wiki
• Interactive tutorial wiki

Changes made to these wiki pages will be tracked and edits will be moved back into the Ubiquity codebase as early as 0.1.9.

Combined with the imminent internationalization of Ubiquity commands, allowing contributors to localize commands without digging into the JavaScript code, there will soon be lots of different ways for to get involved with the further development of Ubiquity!

I just made a screencast with Foxkeh to demo the Ubiquity next generation parser demo and to demonstrate how easy it is to add your own language. Foxkeh wants you to localize the parser into your language. How could you say no? ^^

Foxkeh demos Ubiquity Parser: The Next Generation from mitcho on Vimeo.

There are some details which are not covered in this introductory video, such as how to deal with case marking languages or languages without spaces. Hopefully this’ll inspire some people to play with the demo, though. I’d love to hear your comments! ^^

I recently have traveled a fair deal and have met many people excited about the Ubiquity project and its localization efforts. “I want to help,” say the people, but many are unsure where to start.

As a linguist, studying a language involves looking at instances of that language as data. To this end, we as Ubiquity internationalizers need to get at some examples of target utterances. Here’s an example survey which could be a good starting point for native speakers who want to contribute information on their language, based on Blair’s list of common Ubiquity verbs.

(more…)

Earlier today I blogged on three different strategies languages use to mark the roles of different arguments: word order, marking on the arguments, and marking on the verbs.

I gathered some data from the fantastic World Atlas of Language Structures to put together a survey of many of the languages on the Internet. For each of the languages, I got the canonical word order and whether the language marks the role of its argument on the verb and/or the arguments themselves.

As you can see, there are a number of data points that are still missing. Please contribute information on the languages you speak! You can edit the spreadsheet on Google Docs. Thanks!