Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2013 August 18

Welcome to the Wikipedia Language Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is a transcluded archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

August 18

Cham alphabet fonts?

Cham script is included in the Unicode standard (U+AA00 ... U+AA5F). Is anybody aware of a free Unicode font for this script? Through a cursory google search I found one available but for a price and only for Macs (ewwww). I would like to add Cham script to our articles on Champa, Cham language and Cham people.--William Thweatt ^TalkContribs 06:45, 18 August 2013 (UTC)

English Etymological Dictionary

I'm looking for a text file that has, for each word in the English language, a list of the languages the word has passed through to get to English. Basically, an etymological dictionary without any sort of explanations, or older forms. Thanks in advance. Vidtharr (talk) 16:56, 18 August 2013 (UTC)

I don't see how you can have one without the other. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 03:17, 19 August 2013 (UTC)

I agree: Although you hypothetically could have one without the other, you now actually can't have one without the other, because no one has made such a collection. None of the three English etymological dictionaries worth citing (Oxford, Klein, Chambers) is merely such a list, and I doubt anyone has systematically gone through any of these and pared the information down into such a list. --Atethnekos (Discussion, Contributions) 03:54, 19 August 2013 (UTC)

The OP seems to have in mind some clean sortable text with just vocabulary items and no text. Nobody's going to do that without expecting recompensation. W. W. Skeat's Etymological English Dictionary (4 parts, 1879-1882; rev, and enlarged, 1910) is an excellent free text. μηδείς (talk) 04:36, 19 August 2013 (UTC)

Hmmm, I guess I'll have to make it myself. Does anyone know where I could download a free English etymological dictionary (preferably in a text format, and maybe non-OCR)? Thank you for the replies. Vidtharr (talk) 05:09, 19 August 2013 (UTC)

"Nobody's going to do that without expecting recompensation" - that's exactly why people do write things for which they perceive a market, and get them published and sold. Maybe what Medeis means is that there is little known demand for such a book. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 05:56, 19 August 2013 (UTC)

I'm not sure we should give up so easily. While books and dictionaries aren't what the OP is looking for, a corpus (things like CELEX) may well have this information. I haven't worked much with English corpora so I'm not sure which ones of any have etymological information in them, but there are thousands of corpora so I bet there's something out there, and they're usually in a format that is suitable for automated data mining. You can check out the Linguistic Data Consortium to search, or ask around. Some are available for free, many or not. rʨanaɢ (talk) 14:00, 19 August 2013 (UTC)