Digital dictionary to include indigenous languages
Radio Chilena 16/03/2004

A new website will feature a 200-language dictionary including words in the tongues of indigenous peoples such as Mapunzugun, Aymara and Rapanui.

Just log on to the Ministry of Education page to use this free service provided free of charge thanks to an agreement signed by the head of this Ministry, Sergio Bitar, and Logos Group, one of the top ten companies in the multilingual information field.

The majority shareholder in the company, with 61% control, is Rodrigo Vergara Meersohn, a native Chilean now living in Italy who set up one of the first ever virtual dictionaries.
As the entrepreneur himself explained, the idea was that people the world over could enter words into the dictionary, thereby adding to the current total of 5,000 people interacting with the website.

The latest innovation is the inclusion of the tongues of native peoples such as Mapunzugun, Aymara and Rapanui, in the hope that further minority languages will also be added.
Rodrigo Vergara insists that this is a way of saving the languages of the most ancient peoples. Of the 7,000 languages currently spoken, he stated, half will disappear by the end of this century. In a number of cases, there are no newspapers, schools or television to pass them on hence they tend to disappear taking with them the culture and way of living of the peoples to whom the languages belong.

One sure thing is that, thanks to this tool, an effort is being made to preserve linguistic diversity in the same way as others try to safeguard biology, plant or animal life. "The dictionary is freely accessible to allow anyone, anywhere in the world to contribute to it, in fact, about 1,000 words are added to the dictionary every day", he explained.

"We believe that there should be no inequality between cultures, that no one culture is better than another. They are simply different and this diversity is a gift to us all, so we should together work to ensure no language is lost", he underlined.

Mineduc's role in this context will be to select people speaking Chile’s three indigenous languages by way of a public competition. These individuals will then be trained by Logos to enter words into the dictionary.
The Logos portal also offers a digital library containing more than 35,000 freely downloadable books, six thousand of which are in Spanish. To go straight to the Logos page, just enter www.logos.it. According to Vergara, many authors give a free copy of their books to the online site realizing that, even though this means the book is freely distributed, readers are also more likely to purchase the printed copy.

Another interesting service offered in this website is the translations of famous sayings or verbs in many different languages.

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