About ICSAL
What Is This
Venture About?
This central point of this venture is that it is just a website (that may grow into a portal in the long run) to do things related only to language.
We mean all things related to language such as creation of reference material for language work, conducting courses in languages for various sections of the society and giving a chance to linguists and scholars to work on various aspects of language and linguistics and pursue studies in interdisciplinary areas
Why Choose
What Is The Need
For This Website.
-
Language is Central To Many Areas Of Study
We all know that language is central to many areas of study. In fact, it is inconceivable to talk of a computer sciences without reference to language. In spite of this, study in language has been on the wane, departments of linguistics are shrinking due to lack of funds and interest among students is fading. We can say that the study of linguistics is on the decline.
-
Resurrect The Interest By Rethinking
. We need to resurrect the interest by rethinking on the nature of language and its relevance to other areas. For example logic has been dealing with truth tables for a long time and they are also widely used in computer programmes as well. Why hasn’t there been any attempt to view the tables from the point of view of language. If it can be done, it might help computing a lot. We will argue in a later post that the ‘If’ table is nothing but an avatar of the ‘and’ table.
-
Problem Of A Linguistic Theory
The problem of a linguistic theory is still a major concern. The current Chomskyan endeavour has pushed linguistics to the classroom. It does not address the common man who should be the real beneficiary of the theory. The discussion on universal grammar does not go beyond English examples. We intend to provide scholars of many world languages to contribute to the development of a linguistic theory.
The dominant publication industry publishes what sells well. So, there is an abundance of material for major languages like English and French, but there is a dearth of even reference material in minor languages. We wish to cater to the needs of many languages of the world. This will amount to the development and empowerment of minor languages. -
Application Of The Theory
Minor languages of the world lack the resources to develop applications like speech-therapy, machine translation, developing communication and negotiation skills, develop and use lexical resources. These have immense social impact. A multilingual dictionary we are planning will save millions of trees and tons of carbon deposits every year.
Preservation of Endangered Languages :ICSAL is working on ways to preserve languages in such a way that can avoid their getting extinct.
Our Motois TOGETHER WE CAN.
Are We Really Capable oF Doing All This?
The path to achieve something has two facets – to know what to do and to know how to do it. You may have sensed from the above discussion that we have set before us the objectives in very clear terms.
- Regarding the question of how to do it, we do have some inkling as to how to go ahead
- we also know that we can achieve something big if we put our resources together.
- Our motto is TOGETHER WE CAN.