megabyte_dataMultilingual North European Bird Dictionary
About (Unicode font version)
Updated: 20040825
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.
The Multilingual North European Bird Dictionary is a collection of over 26,000 bird names stored in 34 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.
In theory, 34 language tables enable the generation of 1,122 (= 34 x 33) 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 that use diacritic characters :
- Note the comments below on non-Latin (Cyrillic and Greek) alphabets and diacritic characters: the displays are in Unicode, the user inputs are not (yet).
- 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. Generally, if they are not in the right place, they usually (but not always!) show before A or after Z.
Language name data table contents (no. of names for each language), and notes :
| Language name data table contents | ||
| Language | No. of bird names | Notes |
| Bulgarian | 397 | Listings sort correctly, but input into search-specification text boxes NOT available |
| Catalan | 662 | |
| Czech | 520 | |
| Danish | 832 | |
| Dutch | 869 | |
| English | 1707 | |
| English (folk names) | 3103 | |
| Esperanto | 397 | |
| Estonian | 570 | |
| 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 | |
| Greek | 408 | Listings sort correctly, but input into search-specification text boxes NOT available |
| 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 | 860 | Listings sort correctly, but input into search-specification text boxes NOT available |
| Slovak | 544 | |
| Slovenian | 287 | |
| Spanish | 857 | |
| Swedish | 874 | |
| Turkish | 452 | |
| Ukrainian | 416 | Listings sort correctly, but input into search-specification text boxes NOT available |
| Welsh | 672 | |
Enjoy!
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