Astro Language

More information

Background

I began the Astro Language project in early 1990s. I don't remember the exact date anymore. One of the inspirations for project was European co-operation between amateur astronomers. I liked to create a tiny piece of useful information for astronomy hobbyists.

In the beginning of the project I had already many friends from different European countries. The bulletin board co-operation and later Internet increased contacts to many amateurs. It is always nice to ask and get contribution. Many people are interested in languages. The credits of this project are in the end of this document.

The dictionary is partial collected by myself. The good base of the project was Josip Kleczer's "Astronomical Dictionary in six Languages (English, Russian, German, French, Italian, Czech)". It is rather oldish, from year 1961, but gave a good beginning for project. Later many words of these six languages are updated by native speakers. I have also used books, magazines and www pages the collect words. I still keep myself more as editor. The conbributor's work is remarkable.

Ten years the project was distributed as a text file in BBSes and Internet FTP servers. Finally in autumn 2002 I got time enough to make a www version of the dictionary. It is now based on SQL database.

About dictionary

The collection of 300 words is not very systematic. There are lots of important terminology and basic words, but many astronomical terms are missing. The dictionary includes some terminology from atmospheric phenomena. In some countries these are very popular amoung amateur astronomers. The constellation part includes all the 88 constellation.

We can't say these 300 words are enough the understand astronomical text. We need perhaps 500-600 words to have of useful dictionary. Maybe in some day I will extend the recent number of the words in the dictionary.

The selected languages are not whatever languages. My criteria are these:
(1) They are European languages
(2) Languages are used in amateur astronomy activities.

Some special keys

There are some special keys in the dictionary:

Word- word is a leading part of a compound word

-word word is the following part of a compound word

Word .. word an adjective used in many astronomical terms (eg. IRREGULAR variable, IRREGULAR galaxy etc.)

[word] explaining word in case another word has many meanings

(word) word part of term, but the preceding adjective is the essential word

w. word is abbreviated (whole word is available near)

Credits

Special thanks for the contribution of this project to:

Marco Carrubba, ITALY (Italian updates and checking)

Krzysztof Czart, POLAND (Polish updates, checking, menus and info pages)

Jurre van Dijken, NETHERLANDS (Dutch updates and checking)

Jordi Iparraquirre, SPAIN/CATALONIA (Spanish, Catalan and partial French)

Ott Kaal, ESTONIA (Estonian)

Primoz Kajdic, SLOVENIA (Slovenian)

Timo Kinnunen, FINLAND (partial Russian)

Preben Kristensen, DENMARK (Danish updates and checking)

Mika Laari, FINLAND (Italian updates, checking and menus)

Andreas Lumpp, GERMANY (German updates and checking)

Aivis Meijers, LATVIA (Latvian updates and checking)

Jari Mäkinen, FINLAND (partial French)

Karol Pankowski, POLAND (Polish)

Robert Soubie, FRANCE (French updates and checking)

"Spacer", Observatory Roztoky, SLOVAKIA (Slovakian)

Matti Suhonen, FINLAND (partial Polish and some Czech)

Kostas Symeonidis, GREECE (Greek)

Istvan Teplizcky, HUNGARY (Hungarian)