Credits

• Dedication
• Project name:
  The word Mediaglyphs was first introduced by Neal Stephenson in his sciencefiction novel "The diamond age".
  We are trying to make his vision become reality.
• Creators:
  The MediaGlyphs project is conceived and directed by Giuseppe Insana. Those who contributed or still contribute theoretical and practical assistance to the project are:
  • Cheng Dong Seon; Sheng Kuang; Geoff; Stupka, Elia; Gelio, Giovanni: discussion, testing, suggestions
  • Sheng Kuang; Wang Ya Hsuan; Yang Shang Jiong: editing and assistance with Mandarin wordlist
  • Wang Ya Hsuan: many helpful discussions about Chinese grammar
  • Iwamoto Saiko: help with the musical pronunciation scheme
  • Geoff: editing and maintenance of German wordlist, creation of Finnish, Russian and Arabic wordlists; phonetic names rendering and text2speech
  • Spada Pianezzola, Davide: editing of Spanish & French wordlists
  • Foundalis, Harry E.: creation and maintenance of Greek wordlist
  • Zuckermann, Ghil`ad: linguistic suggestions
  • Totola, Cristian: advice for website creation
  • Gelio, Giovanni: glyphs creation
  • the Unilang community : wordlists and linguistic knowledge
  • Gompel, Maarten van: UniLang-MediaGlyphs exchanges, php programming, MG-Unilang vocabulary editing system
  • Borza, Paul Valentin & Oprea, Radu: first prototype input software programming
  • Vipond, James: glyphs creation
  • Liu Yuan, Chloe: curation of MG sentence translations and MG reference grammar
  • Uriel Siva Insana: glyphs creation
• Programs:
  The following programs are currently used to create new glyphs:
  
  • Vectorial 2D graphics: Corel Draw & Inkscape
  • 3D objects: POV-Ray
  • 3D poses and animations: Poser & DAZ|Studio
  • 3D sceneries: Bryce
  • GIF animation conversions: Microsoft GIF animator
  Perl, Php, Python, Linux & Vim are used extensively.
  Lame, a free and open-source mp3 encoder is used to compress all music samples, which were originally created with the program Reason and then recreated with the perl module MIDI::Simple.
  
  Iconv for character set conversions
  Yudit and BabelPad: two excellent free unicode text editors.
• Fonts:
  The following fonts have been used in glyph creation
  • Latin font: Arial
  • Free Devanagari font: Kiran
  • Kaiti chinese font: Arphic
  • Katakana: Bitstream cyberbit
  • Music symbols
• Translations:
  Translations for the glyphs have been either manually inserted by our language curators or adapted from the following electronic wordlists:
  • Hanzi-500 (list of most frequent chinese characters)
  • CEDICT (Chinese-English wordlist)
  • Universal Language Dictionary (by Richard K. Harrison)
  • Bulgarian Rechnik
  • EDICT (Japanese-English wordlist)
  • Unilang Basicwords
  • Arabic wordlist from Arabeyes
  • geonames.de "The countries of the world in their own languages" (by Werner Fröhlich)

  Many English definitions and some example sentences come from the lexical database WordNet [Princeton University "About WordNet." WordNet. Princeton University. 2010].

  The multilingual example sentences are from the database: Tatoeba [which is released under the license CC-BY 2.0 FR].

• Text-To-Speech:
  TTS for phonetic names achieved thanks to mbrola and using the freely available txt2pho programs or coding new ad hoc ones.
  For Mandarin Chinese, the MSRCN tts has been used.
  
• Glyphs:
  Some glyphs were temporarily borrowed from internet, in particular:
  • Internet picture dictionary
  • Universal Picture Language (Copyright Wally Flint)
  • Clip Art Connection
  • Learning and Teaching Scotland
  • Open Clip Art Library
  • Clipart ETC (c) University of South Florida
  • Free Digital Photos
  • National Space Science Data Center, NASA
  • NOAO/AURA
  • Free ClipArt
  • Clker.com royalty free & public domain vector clip art
  • Sodipodi Flags 1.6
  or made using TrueType dingbat-like fonts (e.g. Animals, Signs....)
   
  These will all eventually be recreated and are just temporarily used.

If you own the copyright for any material that has been used in this project and you are not satisfied by our non-profit use of it, please contact us and we will remove it.
Thank you for your consideration.