Tsammalex is a multilingual lexical database on plants and animals including linguistic, anthropological and biological information as well as images. It has been set up as a resource for linguists, anthropologists and other researchers, language planners and speech communities interested in the conservation of their biological knowledge. In the current version, it is still focused on particular geographical regions reflecting the interests of the present contributors (Kalahari basin in Southern Africa, Dogon languages in West Africa).
Lexical and biological data can be accessed directly (tabs "Names" and "Taxa", respectively) or filtered for specific languages ("Languages") or geographical regions ("Ecoregions" ), with varying details. The tabs "References" and "Images" include lists of sources and individual images.
Tsammalex has been developed by Robert Forkel and compiled by Christfried Naumann, Lena Sell, Noémie Jaulgey and Kathrin Heiden. Significant amounts of data were added by Jeffrey Heath and colleagues (Dogon Languages Project) and edited by Steven Moran and Robert Forkel. Another bulk of data has been imported from the Reference Lexicon of the languages of Africa ( RefLex) by Guillaume Segerer and S. Flavier. Peter Fröhlich, Hans-Jörg Bibiko, Jan Klom and Stefan Koch were involved in former versions of the database.
The project was funded by the Department of Linguistics of the Max Planck Insititute for Evolutionary Anthropology's led by Bernard Comrie. Tsammalex is published as part of the Cross-Linguistic Linked Data project, led by Martin Haspelmath and maintained by the department of Cultural and Linguistic Evolution.
The content of this web site including the downloadable database, is published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (unless stated otherwise).
All images and other data included in this database should be under creative commons license. Sensitive information that may cause conflicts in communities or harm to their environment, or that may threaten biological species (such as information about specific ways of killing animals or detailed information on medical uses) must not be included here. Cultural knowledge should not be published without the consent of the communities it belongs to.
Tsammalex