New South Asian scripts in Unicode 6.1How you can help Unicode is a project that aims to provide a single character encoding for all writing systems known to man so far. (If you like to learn more about Unicode and why it matters to scholars of non-European languages see this article in the jalasthāna wiki.) [...]
At October 19-21, 2011 the 32nd annual meeting of the TeX Users Group (TUG) was held in Trivandrum, Kerala. The presentations concerned the current devolopment of LaTeX, as well as the employment of TeX in sciences like Mathematics and… Indology. Videos of the presentations can be found at: http://river-valley.tv/conferences/tug-2011 Among these the presentation by Dominik Wujastyk [...]
GNU aspell is a free and powerful spellchecker, that can be used from a variety of applications. You might already know it, if you are working with LyX or Emacs. What I found problematic with aspell for a while is, that it did not seem to be able to recognize words written in IAST like [...]
From a comment to one of my earlier articles I just learned from Skalldan’s blog Amṛta, which seems to have a similar focus to this one and lot’s of very useful postings. Unfortunately the postings are written in Japanese, so the automatic translation of Google-Translator‘s robotic linguist is by now my only access to it’s [...]
Sanskrit and Pali texts have been written down in a vast variety of scripts. (To a certain extent they still are.) Although you will find most edited Pali in Latin script, when you become interested in actual manuscripts learning a new script is unavoidable. You may also be already familiar with a certain writing system, [...]
I guess most language learners are familiar with flash cards and the various methods to commit bitwise information to long-term memory. But the classical type of flash cards (front: word, back: translation) does certainly not fit all types of learners. You might be more the visual learner, who does associate words rather with pictures that [...]
As I have mentioned in earlier posts, some offline searchable dictionaries are available on the internet, which are directly relevant to indological or buddhological studies. (See here for some examples). These dictionaries can be searched by using special dictionary programs. Such programs are for example StarDict and Goldendict. Both tools are released under a free [...]
There hasn’t been any posting on this blog for weeks. This is mainly because I spent the time in bringing something to life, which was an idea in my head ever since I have started blogging: http://jalasthana.de/wiki/. This needs a few words of explanation. Some neglected potential I am fascinated in the many ways of [...]
This is officially the first posting on this blog. Alle the other entries are imported from my former blog named jālashāna. If you are new to this blog, you will find an introduction here. What is new? jalasthāna Theme With my own WordPress instance I had the opportunity to move from the corporate design of [...]
I recently stumbled upon the Digital Tibetan Wiki, a real kośa of tools and hacks for Students of Tibetan. Among many other interesting things, they provide a free Tibetan-English dictionary in StarDict format. If you don’t know, what StarDict format means, see my earlier posts on StarDict and GoldenDict. The dictionary is based on the [...]