[Foundation-l] Encarta is dead

[Waerth]

Tomorrow is April 1st .......

> On Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 12:56 PM, Ziko van Dijk <zvandijk at googlemail.com> wrote:
>   
>> The Encarta people were very unprecise about what they are going to do in
>> future...
>> So, this means that there remains no big encyclopedia but ours? Except
>> Britannica? And what about the situation in French, Italian etc., has anyone
>> an overview about that?
>> Then I also ask myself in how far this evolution is to be credited mainly to
>> Wikipedia, or has it been "the Internet" in general that killed the
>> dead-tree-encyclopedias. I remember that in 1999 or 2000 I already did not
>> buy a paper encyclopedia because of the Internet.
>>     
>
> As a young student of linguistics I was interested in Sumerian
> language. In 1996 I went to the National library of Serbia and took
> Britannica's 1995 edition. So, I've got the next references:
>
> * Arno Poebel, Grundzüge der sumerischen Grammatik (1923), partly out
> of date, but still the only full grammar of Sumerian in all its
> stages;
> * Adam Falkenstein, Grammatik der Sprache Gudeas von Lagaš, 2 vol.
> (1949–50), a very thorough grammar of the New Sumerian dialect,
> * Das Sumerische (1959), a very brief but comprehensive survey of the
> Sumerian language;
> * Cyril J. Gadd, Sumerian Reading Book (1924), outdated but the only
> grammatical tool in English;
> * Samuel N. Kramer, The Sumerians (1963), provides a general
> introduction to Sumerian civilization.
>
> Anecdote around this is that I was very confident in my linguistic
> knowledge and that I thought that I am able to understand
> linguistically German from 1923 (Arno Poebel's book). So, I went to
> the Library of Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts and asked them to
> make an inter-library borrowing from some German library. With a lot
> of enthusiasm I've started to read it... Of course, it was a complete
> disaster: I wasn't able to take any information. Copy of that book is
> still somewhere in my library.
>
> One year later, in 1997, I tried to find something about Sumerian
> language at the net. Hm. I found at least two sites with full grammars
> of Sumerian dialects. So, I've finished with [traditional]
> encyclopedias.
>
> BTW, the list of references above is from Britannica's [present]
> online edition [1]. Nothing was changed since 1995 edition. I remember
> well the list.
>
> References from the English Wikipedia's article [2] are:
>
> * Edzard, Dietz Otto (2003). Sumerian Grammar. Leiden: Brill. ISBN
> 90-04-12608-2.  (grammar treatment for the advanced student)
> * Thomsen, Marie-Louise (2001) [1984]. The Sumerian Language: An
> Introduction to Its History and Grammatical Structure. Copenhagen:
> Akademisk Forlag. ISBN 87-500-3654-8.  (Well-organized with over 800
> translated text excerpts.)
> * Diakonoff, I. M. (1976). "Ancient Writing and Ancient Written
> Language: Pitfalls and Peculiarities in the Study of Sumerian".
> Assyriological Studies 20 (Sumerological Studies in Honor of Thorkild
> Jakobsen): 99–121.
> * Rubio, Gonzalo (2007). "Sumerian Morphology." In Morphologies of
> Asia and Africa, vol. 2, pp. 1327-1379. Edited by Alan S. Kaye..
> Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns. ISBN 1-57506-109-0.
> * Attinger, Pascal (1993). Eléments de linguistique sumérienne: La
> construction de du11/e/di. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck&Ruprecht. ISBN
> 37-2780-869-1.
> * Volk, Konrad (1997). A Sumerian Reader. Rome: Pontificio Istituto
> Biblico. ISBN 88-7653-610-8.  (collection of Sumerian texts)
> * Michalowski, Piotr, 'Sumerian as an Ergative Language', Journal of
> Cuneiform Studies 32 (1980), 86-103.
>
> [1] - http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/573229/Sumerian-language
> [2] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumerian_language
>
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