[Summary]
Robert Beard, a language teacher at Bucknell University, in Lewisburg,
Pennsylvania (USA), co-founded yourDictionary.com in February 2000 as a
follow-up of his first website, A Web of Online Dictionaries (included
in the new one), launched in 1995 as a directory of online dictionaries
(with 800 links in fall 1998) and other linguistic resources such as
thesauri, vocabularies, glossaries, grammars and language textbooks.
yourDictionary.com included 1,800 dictionaries in 250 languages in
September 2003, and 2,500 dictionaries in 300 languages in April 2007.
As a portal for all languages without any exception, the site also
offered a section for endangered languages, called the Endangered
Language Repository.
***
Five years before co-founding yourDictionary.com in February 2000, as
the portal for all languages without any exception, Robert Beard
created the website A Web of Online Dictionaries (WOD) in 1995.
Robert Beard was a language teacher at Bucknell University, in
Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. In September 1998, his website provided an
index of 800 online dictionaries in 150 languages, as well as sections
for multilingual dictionaries, specialized English dictionaries,
thesauri and other vocabulary aids, language identifiers and guessers,
an index of dictionary indices, the “Web of Online Grammars”, and the
“Web of Linguistic Fun”, i.e. linguistics for non-specialists.
Robert Beard wrote in September 1998: "There was an initial fear that
the web posed a threat to multilingualism on the web, since HTML and
other programming languages are based on English and since there are
simply more websites in English than any other language. However, my
websites indicate that multilingualism is very much alive and the web
may, in fact, serve as a vehicle for preserving many endangered
languages. I now have links to dictionaries in 150 languages and
grammars of 65 languages. Moreover, the new attention paid by browser
developers to the different languages of the world will encourage even
more websites in different languages." (NEF Interview)
Fifteen months later, Robert Beard included his website into a larger
project, yourDictionary.com, that he co-founded in early 2000.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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