Projects currently include dictionaries for Esperanto and Gwich’in. A dictionary can be accessed online by clicking on its link below.
For fun, check out a few suggested words in each language, e.g., ‘wear’, ‘snow’, ‘sun’, ‘reindeer’, ‘caribou’, ‘inhabit/inhabitant’, etc.
Esperanto is fun! :)
The source text for this dictionary is taken from Project Gutenberg and includes approximately 13,000 entries.
You can find other resources for learning Esperanto there as well.
Gwich’in is spoken in both Alaska and Canada. This dictionary focuses on Alaskan or Western Gwich’in, also known as Dinjii Zhuh K’yaa.
Although not necessary, the Gwich’in dictionary works well with the Gwich’in keyboard which can be downloaded and installed on your own machine. Follow instructions for installation and use at that site.
When searching for verbs, you can search using English infinitives in most cases; however, there may be times when you don’t immediately get a hit, e.g., ‘cry.’ In this case, you might want to try searching for the word ‘crying’ or ‘cries’ or ‘cried’ instead. This is because Gwich’in verbs must be inflected (i.e., there are no infinitives), and so they are listed in dictionary entries in their 3rd person present and/or past tense forms. However, this is not a guaranteed solution, and there are many words still missing from this modest dictionary of approximately 3,000 words.
If you have never heard (of) Gwich’in before, please check out the following links:
Tǫǫ Oozhrii Zhìt Tsyaa Tsal Dhidii (Boy in the Moon)
Additional materials for learning and exploring more about Gwich’in can be found in the Gwich’in Athabaskan Language Collection of the Alaska Native Language Archive in Fairbanks.
The user can now choose to search either an English or Gwich’in word by selecting the desired source->target dictionary. Because there are several different orthographic styles, with the same word marked for tone and/or nasalization in one text and unmarked in another, the user can search for the translation of a Gwich’in word with or without special marks or diacritics. In other words, searching ’tǫǫ’ and ’too’ in the direction Gwich’in to English will produce the same result. In some cases, such a search strategy may produce ambiguous results, since tone marking can indeed change the meaning of a word (e.g., shih ’brown bear’ vs. shìh ’food’). However, it is preferable for users to get a few false positives than nothing at all, in case the unknown word comes from a text with inconsistent or no marking. This decision follows that of Mishler & Frank (2019) in their collection of Gwich’in oral stories who state that “[the] ideological demand for precise tone recognition should not become a visual roadblock to literacy or add to Gwich’in historical trauma.”