In order to facilitate phonological, lexicological, syntactic as well as historical, ethnological andsociological studies of Asian and African languages, the Institute uses computers to process text data.In the spring of 1978 a main frame computer system, open to use by outside scholars, was installed toaccumulate databases of these languages. Bilingual dictionaries of Asian, African and Japaneselanguages as well as comprehensive grammars for each language have been compiled. To achievethis, we first machine-process the text data, specifying phonological and syntactic information foreach linguistic form, and produce sorted-out text data with various application programs, such asKWIC (Key-Word In Context).Due to recent advances in computing, not only textual information, but also image and sound datacan be processed by this computer. We are developing a multi-purpose database system which willallow us to retrieve various ethnological data (festival, dance, music and so forth) as well as linguisticcorpora. For the purpose of entering various linguistic data we have developed fonts for Devanagari,Burmese, Bengali, Thai, Khmer, Tibetan, Arabic, Korean and Mongolian etc. This system may provehelpful for establishing new ways of carrying out multi-disciplinary research in the field of Asian andAfrican languages and cultures.LANGUAGEANDCULTUREINFORMATIONPROCESSING18‘Little Panjab’ in LondonSouthall in the western part of London has been known as a Panjabi shopping centerwhere low-priced goods are available. In recent years with the increase of Muslimmigrants, here the number of ‘halal’ meat shops shown in this picture has also increased.(Photo by M. Naito: August 1998)
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