This post is Part 1 of my series on building a dictionary website for the Sourashtra Language.
Photograph by Poras Chaudhary, The New York Times/Redux
Project Background
This is my first post on the dictionary website project, where I am building a site for translations and dictionary for the Sourashtra language. I am currently studying the language to better communicate with my in-laws after marrying into the community. Sourashtra is an endangered language with less than one million speakers. It is spoken primarily in Madurai, though speakers of the language reside in many cities in Tamil Nadu. The goal of this website is to provide a way for people to learn the language through translations of common words, example sentences and their english translations, and in the future, an audio player to learn pronunciations.
Project Motivation
In my studies, my biggest roadblocks have been:
- unreliable or unknown translations for common words
- lack of available sentence structures for grammar
- conjugations of verbs
- pronunciation of words
My goal for this website is to provide resources to people trying to learn Sourashtra and support the language as a valuable reference.
Features
The following features will be available on the site to provide a rich learning experience:
- Search for word in English or Sourashtra
- Get translations for english->sourashtra or sourashtra->english
- Conjugations for verbs
- Audio player for recordings of words
- Categories for structured learning
- Examples of words in context sentences
- Sentence to sentence translation for grammatical examples.
Joman
In Sourashtra, the word Joman means feast. Specifically, a feast that will celebrate some occasion or gathering of family. I’ve decided to name my website Joman Dictionary, in honor of the joman, a gathering where family and friends come together to eat food and celebrate life and share in the joy of a delightful meal.
Pictured above is from my wedding reception, where we sat in long banquet style seating in the wedding hall and ate various chutneys, pongals, and rice on top of banana leafs with our hands.
Next Steps
Now that I’m embarking on my journey to build the website, I will need to model the data. Join me on my next post, where I set up the database : Dictionary Website, Part 2: Database Design