I'm listening to you.
Speak, friend, and find.
The "Maltese language learning aid" started as a simple application for helping myself in learning Maltese. It eventually became something that might be useful for others so I made it available online.
The main features:
The lexicon is in constant evolution. It currently contains items that are not yet available through the normal interface (their level is above the maximum you can set). These items require some work before making them available.
An important part of the lexicon is coming from the Ġabra open lexicon for Maltese (the version of 20-02-2017). The Ġabra contains more than 4 million items and only a small part is used here. The lexicon for this app is further enhanced with everything I learned (or supposed to have learned) from online sources and personal communication with Maltese people.
contents:
A few browsers have currently speech recognition capabilities. If that is the case for you there will be a microphone icon on the right side of the search box. The speech recognition engine doesn't work for the Maltese language but you can search on English words.
Browsers that should work properly: Chrome on desktops, Chrome on Android.
The available sounds files come from the following online sources:
These sources provide recorded sounds spoken by humans and the sound icon has a little green dot to show this.
The only Maltese voice synthesizer I'm aware of is the one provided by the Foundation for Information Technology Accessibility. This project has no online access to the voice syntesizer (but can be downloaded). The sound files generated by this syntesizer are indicated with a blue dot at the sound icon.
I've been working with different languages since the the late 80ties and developped at that time a "multilingual semantic conceptual network" (a decade before the Semantic Web was invented). During the first decade of this century I did extensive research on both topics (and several other ones).
The core notion in the lexicon is therefore not the word but the meaning of a word or a group of words. In other words, the concept you want to express with words.
Example: the Maltese word for shark is kelp il-baħar. Which litterally means dog (of) the sea.
Although kelp il-baħar is composed of two (three if we consider the article il-) words these 2 elements of kelp il-baħar have no semantic relationship with the individual words kelp (dog) and baħar (sea). Kelp il-baħar is the name of a concept and is only accidentally that in English this same concept is expressed by a single word.
As a direct consequence there are a lot of homonyms (identical written words) that have different meanings dependig on the context (phrase) in which they are used.
The examples displayed at the bottom of the screen refer to the meaning of the word currently selected. Phrases containing the same word but with a different meaning (different concept) are not displayed.
If you feel the need to contact me, please do that at my address dedicated to the "Natural Language Learning App" which is an account at Google and written without spaces. For antispam reasons you should figure out what to use exactly, and I'm convinced you will be able to do so if you really want to.
Please include in the subject something like: "error in content", "Request for change or extra functions", "Bug", or anything that makes it clear what the message is about.
If you find this tool useful and would like to financially support the further development of it you can donate bitcoins at:
12B5gCdedZjy3ePKSRpjrs129excboqPR8
Special thanks to the following people who helped me in various ways: Louise-Anne Caruana, Thea Aquillina, Chantelle Shaw and Kim Gerarda.