Further to the discussion of making online material discoverable (using standard metadata or via a more elaborate infrastructure proposed by ELIIP), other useful sources of free online grammars or dictionaries include ‘Online Books’ and the Project Gutenberg sites. These are ‘free’ as in unencumbered by intellectual property or copyright concerns, typically because the authors have been dead for over 50 years, not because they were placed in an open access archive. A sample of the files available follows, but wouldn’t it be great to have a way of announcing these items using standard metadata terms so they could all be searched via a dedicated language service? For example, the entry for Sgau Karen below is followed by Sgaw Karen, so google searching on Sgaw will only give you one of these three items.
Online Books have various grammars and dictionaries:
Project Gutenberg has different sets of texts available for free download in
different jurisdictions, but apparently not all searchable from one
location:
* A Dictionary of Australian Words And Terms (1924?)
* A Dictionary of Austral English, Edward E Morris
* Anglo-Karen Dictionary (1883, 2nd edition 1954) (completed by Mrs J G
BINNEY)
* A Vocabulary of the Sgau Karen Language (1849)
* A Dictionary of the Sgau Karen Language (1896)
David Chandler GILMORE
* A grammar of the Sgaw Karen
* Dictionary and Grammar of the Chamorro Language of the Island of Guam
(1918), by Edward Ritter von Preissig
* Dictionary and Grammar of the Kongo Language, As Spoken at San Salvador, the Ancient Capital of the Old Kongo Empire, West Africa (1887), by W.Holman Bentley
Chinook Dictionary, Catechism, Prayers and Hymns (1871), by Modeste Demers and Francis Norbert Blanchet
* Ivens, W. G. (Walter George), 1871- Grammar and Vocabulary of the Lau Language, Solomon Islands
* Dr. Felix Speiser Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific
Follow
Harald Hammastrom has a list of 2000 or so grammars on his website at http://www.cs.chalmers.se/~harald2/n.htm — unfortunately it is just an alphabetical list sorted by author, uncategorised and none of the entries is linked to web-available resources. Perhaps he could be encouraged to contribute to the project you describe?
And searching for ‘grammar’ gets such random results as
[Info] Captain Boldheart and the Latin Grammar-Master: A Holiday Romance From the Pen of Lieut-Col. Robin Redforth, Aged 9, by Charles Dickens, illust. by Susan Beatrice Pearse (Gutenberg text, illustrated HTML, and page images)
Google Books; the Internet Archive; and Gallica have a lot of these. Also German Wikisource.
A new project that addresses this concern is Language Description Heritage (see http://cyberling.org/node/9) at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.