GK: "We will continue to have a company website, and to publish a version of the magazine on the Web, but it will remain only one factor in our work. We do use the Internet as a source of information which we then distill for our readers, who would otherwise be faced with the biggest problem of the Web — undiscriminating floods of information."
3.2. Language Directories
The Ethnologue is the electronic version of The Ethnologue, 13th ed., (editor: Barbara F. Grimes, consulting editors: Richard S. Pittman and Joseph E. Grimes), published in 1996 by the Summer Institute of Linguistics, Dallas, Texas. This catalogue of more than 6,700 languages spoken in 228 countries is accessible through two search tools: The Ethnologue Name Index, which lists language names, dialect names, and alternate names, and The Ethnologue Language Family Index, which organizes languages according to language families.
Barbara F. Grimes, editor of The Ethnologue, wrote in her e-mail of August 18, 1998:
"Multilingual web pages are more widely useful, but much more costly to maintain. We have had requests for The Ethnologue in a few other languages, but we do not have the personnel or funds to do the translation or maintenance, since it is constantly being updated.
We have found the Internet to be useful, convenient, and supplementary to our work. Our main use of it is for e-mail.
It is a convenient means of making information more widely available to a wider audience than the printed Ethnologue provides.
On the other hand, many people in the audience we wish to reach do not have access to computers, so in some ways the Ethnologue on Internet reaches a limited audience who own computers. I am particularly thinking of people in the so-called 'third world'."
Created in December 1995 by Yoshi Mikami of Asia Info Network, The Languages of the World by Computers and the Internet (commonly called Logos Home Page or Kotoba Home Page) gives, for each language, its brief history, features, writing system, and character set and keyboard for computers and the Internet processing. In his e-mail of December 17, 1998, Yoshi Mikami wrote:
"My native tongue is Japanese. Because I had my graduate education in the US and worked in the computer business, I became bilingual Japanese/American English. I was always interested in different languages and cultures, so I learned some Russian, French and Chinese along the way. In late 1995, I created on the Web The Languages of the World by Computers and the Internet and tried to summarize there the brief history, linguistic and phonetic features, writing system and computer processing for each of the six major languages of the world, in English and Japanese. As I gained more experience, I invited my two associates to write a book on viewing, understanding and creating the multilingual web pages, which was published in August, 1997, as "The Multilingual Web Guide" (see its support page) in the Japanese edition, the world's first book on such a subject.