[open-humanities] Open Databases for Verb Morphology

Fri Jan 20 10:35:00 UTC 2012

Hi David,

How does this look: http://www.verbix.com/languages/ ?
>

It looks very interesting. I've had a play around with it, and agree that
they could be doing so much more, especially as regards opening themselves
to user contributions to their database: the verbix wiki seems to be a
gesture towards this, but it is quite disappointing http://wiki.verbix.com/

>
> If there is no source from which you could import verb conjugation data, I
> wonder if crowd-sourcing would be a viable way to build up a database?

Crowd-sourcing is certainly a possibility (and something that I had not
thought of before), although everything submitted would have to be checked
in minute detail before it could be used; further, Ancient Greek presents
an additional layer of complexity since it has a large quantity of accents
and subscripted letters (e.g  λυθεῖτε ) that are difficult to type on a
standard keyboard. All this could be overcome with an easy-to-use
interface, of course, but I think that I'll keep exploring for a bit before
trying to build such a thing.

I'm trying to get in touch with the people behind perseus (
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/) which, given the services they
provide (including many of those regarding texts and examples that you
mention), must have a large verb morphology database within it.
Unfortunately, although they claim to be 'open', thedatahub.org has them
classed as "Not Openly Licensed", and this worries me.

Thanks for the feedback, though, and I shall keep the list updated with
progress,

James
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