Need help identifying a language?

Most libraries acquire material in different languages.   Sometimes though the language may be unfamiliar to the cataloger or be similar to another language.  The Language Identifier from Xerox can help you identify whether your material is in Portuguese or Spanish.  Currently 47 different languages can be identified from Albanian to Welsh.

Another language identifier is the TextCat Demo which came about from a paper presented during the Third Annual Symposium on Document Analysis and Information Retrieval in 1994. A wider range of languages can be identified from Afrikaans to Yiddish with a total of 76 languages.

 

ALA-LC Romanization Tables

For the most part, what you have here are links to the scanned text of the ALA-LC Romanization Tables: Transliteration Schemes for Non-Roman Scripts, 1997 edition. The printed book is still available from LC’s Cataloging Distribution Service, and you may, like me, just use it most of the time. But the Web version includes updated tables for Chinese (reflecting LC’s adoption of Pinyin romanization in 2000), Kurdish (replacing the Perso-Arabic and non-Slavic Cyrillic tables of 1997), Ladino (2005), and Inuktitut (2007).

www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/roman.html

 

Omniglot

To quote the “About this site” page:

“Omniglot is a guide to the writing systems and languages of the world.

“It also contains tips on learning languages, language-related articles, quite a large collection of useful phrases in many languages, multilingual texts, a multilingual book store and an ever-growing collection of links to language-related resources.”

www.omniglot.com

 

Roman Numerals

Don’t know what year MCMIV or MCMLXXXVIII is?  Nova Roma is an excellent place to convert those years.

http://www.novaroma.org/via_romana/numbers.html