Re: Anyone see this? A fantastic resource!

>Has anyone seen
>http://www.wordgumbo.com/index.htm? The site contains wordlists of, among
a
>number of others, Turkish, Tahitian, Russian, Finnish, French, Swahili,
>Zulu...and even Yoruba!! Words, so many words...J Y S Czhang's dream come
>true - the place for exotic mangalangers!
Thanks a lot for the link, very interesting.

Although such raw wordlists are useful mainly to borrow words as whole
units, because they don't tell you how the words provided are built nor
how they are used. For example, the Basque wordlist gives "lotsaturik" as
the translation for "ashamed". Well, not even in English "ashamed" is a
basic root, but for some reason the word from which it is derived is not
provided in the list. So you won't know that the Basque root for the basic
meaning "shame" is "lotsa" and that "lotsaturik" is merely a regular
derivation thereof. No grammar tag is provided either, so you won't know
that "lotsaturik" acts adverbially in Basque and that English "ashamed"
actually has several translations: the invariable adverbial
forms "lotsaturik" and "lotsatuta" (e.g. "umea bere logelan zegoen
lotsaturik", the child was in his bedroom ashamed) and the declinable
participle "lotsatu" from which the former derive (e.g. "ume lotsatua bere
logelan zegoen", the ashamed child was in his bedroom).

Cheers,
Javier