Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Anstey, Matthew" <MAnstey AT csu.edu.au>]

Dear friends,

Martin Haspelmath posted the following today. 

Through a joint effort of the Max Planck Digital Library and the
Department of Linguistics of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary
Anthropology, all the data and analytical texts from The World Atlas of
Language Structures are now freely available online ("WALS Online"), at
http://wals.info. The materials are published under a Creative Commons
License, guaranteeing open access for users and inviting scientists to
use them for their work.

The site shows data on over 2500 languages, for which more than 6500
references have been used. Searching and browsing is possible by
structural feature, by language name or language family, by reference
and by author. The analytical texts contain links to all the references
and all the languages. The maps can be shown at any zoom level, and the
map symbols can be displayed in various shapes and colours. A wide range
of export options is available.

As in the book version from 2005, all languages are equal in WALS
Online: each language, regardless of number of speakers, is represented
on the map by the same circular symbol. For linguists, small and
endangered languages threatened with imminent extinction are fully as
interesting as large national languages.

WALS Online provides information on a vast range of structural
variables: number of consonants (from 6 to 122), presence of rare sounds
like ö and ü, tone systems, gender categories, plural formation, number
of cases, verbal future and past forms, imperatives, word order,
passives, numerals, colour terms, writing systems, and more.

Links:
WALS Online: http://wals.info
MPI for Evolutionary Anthropology: http://www.eva.mpg.de/
Department of Linguistics: http://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/
Max Planck Digital Library: http://www.mpdl.mpg.de