I keep downloading Audactiy but never use it! Thinking of doing a podcast interview with an old relative talking about my grand-aunt who just died aged 95. Will need it then.

http://ga.openoffice.org/

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

http://www.microsoft.com/ireland/gaeilge/

Beidh ort d’obair bhaile fhéin a dhéanamh ina dhiadh sin, Conor!

We’ve had no offline contact on this. Until I get a block of spare time (I’m figuring early 2008), I doubt I’ll get to do a thing on it. Of course if you wanted to run with it………

Where I work in Frontier, there are four fluent Irish speakers, and 2 or 3 others (like myself) who make a stab and/or have Gaeilge interfaces on their PCs/Firefox/etc.

Tá áthas orm san a chlos. Cheap mé go raibh tú éirithe as ar mhaithe le tograí eile.

The chances of me doing anything on this in the next few months are minimal as I’m flat out building up the léirmheasanna in LouderVoice BTW, we have our first non-English review in the Beta Test site – it’s of No Béarla.

Irish speakers are everywhere. There’s lots of it on Bebo, for example. If there is a trend among people who use it online, it’s that a disproportionate number are outside the Gaeltacht and, even more so, outside Ireland. The farther you are from other speakers, the more likely you are to be a Net-Gaeilgeoir.

The sad thing is that you could share an office or live near someone with fluent Irish and never hear it. You could both be fluent speakers and not know it.

Here’s what I would suggest — I’d do it myself if I could clone myself or else manage to work 200 hours a week

You could try putting together a kind of dictionary aggregator, a thin search interface that will pass queries on to englishirishdictionary.com, focal.ie, etc. Kind of like dogpile.com. You’d probably want to ask permission from the different sites first, but I think setting it up would be pretty easy. This way you’d avoid duplicating effort, and focal.ie wouldn’t have to worry about quality issues with users trying to add data to their site.

Then add on to this front end your wiki idea so users can add words when they’re not found in any of the dictionaries. You could even automatically keep track of all queries that returned no results, and post these as “most wanted” terms somewhere (based on my experience browsing the aimsigh.com logs, I’d advise that you filter this for 4 letter words)

I have open source software for “stemming” Irish words (the léirmheas(tóir)(eacht)(a) problem) that I’d be willing to provide to solve that problem.

The “technical resource” Michal Boleslav Mechura, behind it has started his own pet dictionary, but it’s still a work in progress (and he probably wont be too happy I’ve blown his cover)

http://mbm.dotnet11.hostbasket.com/potafocal/

There is also An Foclóir Beag online at ul:

http://www.csis.ul.ie/focloir/

(It has an annoying sort order bug – áóúíé come last in the sort order, so if you leave out a fada, its closest word algorithm fails)

cos [ainmfhocal baininscneach den dara díochlaonadh]
(cois in abairtí áirithe) ceann de na géaga a úsáidtear chun siúil; aon ní cosúil leis seo (cos boird, cos pota); clúdach coise (cos treabhsair); lámh, feac, sáfach (cos spáide, cos scine, cos casúir, cos fuipe); an chuid íochtarach (cos leapa).

ar cois (ar siúl, ar bun (tá rud éigin ar cois)).
cois (taobh le (cois na habhann)).
cos ar bolg (leatrom, éagóir, foréigean).
le cois (in éineacht le (tar le mo chois; cúpla punt le cois)).
Foirmeacha
cos – ainmfhocal cos [ainmneach uatha]
coise [ginideach uatha]
cosa [ainmneach iolra]
cos [ginideach iolra]

Collins Pocket dictionary is also online, and I think handles wildcards

http://xreferplus.unext.com/letter_picker.jsp?vol=365

And when the millenium breaks out, Foras na Gaeilge will eventually have its dictionary online.

http://www.focloir.ie

Are there any stats for internet or broadband penetration in Ireland amongst strong Irish speakers or Gaeltachts? I wonder how big a pool of people you could potentially expect to get editors from?

Kevin Scannell is someone who might have valuable input into this kind of project. He’s done a lot of open source Gaeilge work and even developed a search engine optimised for Irish.

the database of stuff we have contains the following on each entry.

English / Irish word
Grammatical category eg. noun, verb
Context, sometimes giving an example

great idea conor – drop me an email (above) and let me know if it kicks off – glad to be of assistance

These State and semi-State efforts are extremely important but my concern is that it immediately limits the resources available to generate the content whereas something like a wiki enables any Irish speaker with an internet connection to contribute.

I’d also doubt that any official effort would allow a free-for-all. I suppose a reasonable intermediate step would be that anyone can contribute but every entry is vetted before accepting. Then the people running a site like focail could focus on being moderators rather than creators?