The Motley Word

I continue the random miscellanea postings with a website I did not know about, and stumbled on because of a posting I will write next week. The Motley Word (Παρδαλή Λέξη) is a crowdsourced dictionary for Greek dialects, like Urban Dictionary and its Greek counterpart, slang.gr

The Motley Word has all the poor quality you'd expect of a crowdsourced project without critical mass of participants; they don't even provide for correction yet. So it's not going to supplant the Academy's dialect dictionary, the Historical Dictionary Of Modern Greek, any time soon. Sure.

But that's harder to say when the Historical Dictionary hasn't budged past delta in twenty years. (I see there's at least funding to digitise their holdings.) And the glossaries of mainstream dialects, as opposed to the more distinct variants like Pontic or Tsakonian, have been pretty motley themselves.

More meta-importantly, the Motley Word shows that speakers of the dialects still care, and it's still a resource. A resource I'm going to make use of soon—here's a hint, but I haven't started writing yet, so shhhhh...

So: excellent work! (And thank God noone's done Tsakonian :-)