megabyte_data : About the Multilingual North European Bird Dictionary

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Multilingual North European Bird Dictionary

About

The Multilingual North European Bird Dictionary is a collection of over 23,000 bird names held in 26 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.
To correctly view names in all of the languages, you will need to download and install MBdbfont (see on separate page).

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. 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. If you want to have the data available on your own PC, buy the European Bird Megafile !

In theory, 26 languages enable the generation of 650 (=26 x 25) 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.

Some diacritic characters fail to display correctly (well, the font does stretch things a bit!). Noticed examples include small o-tilde (does not show at all, leaving a space) and small o-slash (shows as |).

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

Language	No. of bird names	Notes
Catalan	662
Danish	832
Dutch	869
English	1707
English (folk names)	3103
Estonian	570	Display of the o-tilde character fails in this implementation
Faeroese	572	U-acute sorts to the start of the list
Finnish	858
French	993	e-acute is not sorted : the word will be placed as if the e-acute did not exist (important for words beginning with e-acute!)
Gaelic (Scots)	340
German	1024
Hungarian	829
Icelandic	826
Italian	818
Irish (Gaelic)	227
Lappish (Sami)	196
Latin (Linnaean)	1110 distinct species + 239 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	915	Z-caron sorts as O (!), otherwise correct
Lithuanian	463
Norwegian	948
Polish	871
Potuguese	812
Russian	259	Russian name listings do not sort correctly. Also, 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	857
Swedish	874
Welsh	672

Enjoy!

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