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Multilingual North European Flora Dictionary

About (Unicode font version)

To correctly view names in all of the languages, you will need a Unicode-capable browser (works with IE5, NN4.5). To enable correct viewing, HTML pages are hard-coded to force the UTF-8 character set, and to use the Verdana font (which now contains all of the European Latin diacritic and Cyrillic characters required for correct multilingual display).

You may need to adjust your browser settings to fit in with this requirement: not all browser setups seem to respond automatically. If fonts do not display correctly, manually change the font encoding to UTF-8 in the browser's Encoding|Character Set options.

Note that this implementation has not much improved the as-is sorting capabilities of the databases (except in Russian) - it does, however, save you the bother of downloading the MBdata font, thus giving a better display.

The Multilingual North European Flora Dictionary is a collection of ca. 70,000 plant names held in 24 separate language data tables. The tables are interconnected on demand by the user to generate language-specific listings, bilingual dictionaries and species-specific multilingual data displays.

This FREE on-line dictionary permits access to ALL of the data, but for operational reasons, retrieved list lengths and the number of retrieved records in a search recordset is limited to paged displays. However, by using the provided search tools and a sensible search strategy, you should easily be able to access any single-species data of interest.

In theory, 24 languages enable the generation of 552 (=24 x 23) different 2-way dictionaries. This would be an absolute publisher's nightmare, and no-one would ever dream of publishing such a product on paper ...
A book version, apart from being readable in the bath, is less flexible than the database implementation in terms of user-configuration of displayed information.


Be aware of the following when searching languages which use diacritic characters :

  • Note the comments below on Cyrillic letters
  • The system will only accept characters a - z into search-string boxes (case-insensitive)
  • If you specify an alphabetic list-limiting character, only names starting with the non-diacriticised character will be retrieved.
  • Diacritic characters may not be sorted in the right order, and, if not in the right place, they will usually show before A or after Z.


Language name data table contents (no. of names for each language), and notes :

Language No. of plant names Notes
Catalan 226
Danish 2044
Dutch 2381
English 5013
English (folk names) 6036
Estonian 1820
Faeroese 508U-acute sorts to the start of the list
Finnish 2221
French 5085
Gaelic (Scots) 661
German 6043
Icelandic 587
Irish (Gaelic) 137
Italian 4346
Latin (Linnaean) 6030 (distinct species + synonyms) Synonyms are searchable when Latin is selected as the language - they are shown as (bracketed items) in the species-specific multilingual data display
Latvian 4241Z-caron sorts as O (!), otherwise correct
Lithuanian 6086
Norwegian 2348
Polish 2287
Portuguese 1435
Russian 3186 Russian name listings sort correctly, but the only characters which will work when input into search-specification text boxes are A, B, C, E, H, K, M, O, P, T and X - where they are interpreted as the corresponding Cyrillic letters.
Spanish 961
Swedish 2845
Welsh 3167


Enjoy!

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