A Guide to the Syuba (Kagate) Language Documentation Corpus
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Language Documentation in the Aftermath of the 2015 Nepal Earthquakes: a Guide to Two Archives and a Web Exhibit
Vol. 13 (2019), pp. 618–651 http://nflrc.hawaii.edu/ldc http://hdl.handle.net/10125/24914 Revised Version Received: 4 Nov 2019 Language documentation in the aftermath of the 2015 Nepal earthquakes: A guide to two archives and a web exhibit Kristine Hildebrandt Southern Illinois University Edwardsville Tanner Burge-Beckley Southern Illinois University Edwardsville Jacob Sebok Southern Illinois University Edwardsville We describe two institutionally related archives and an online exhibit represent- ing a set of Tibeto-Burman languages of Nepal. These archives and exhibit were built to house materials resulting from documentation of twelve Tibeto-Burman languages in the aftermath of the 2015 Nepal earthquakes. This account includes a detailed discussion of the different materials recorded, and how they were pre- pared for the collections. This account also provides a comparison of the two different types of archives, the different but complementary functions they serve, and a discussion of the role that online exhibits can play in the context of language documentation archives. 1. Introduction 1 The field of documentary linguistics has made use of a widear- ray of increasingly sophisticated computing technologies in recent years in order to archive, catalogue, and ultimately preserve vast quantities of audio, video, and text materials from endangered and vulnerable languages for future access by com- munity members and scholars alike. Notable examples of data archival reposito- ries, hosted and managed by higher educational institutions -
Computational Lexicography: a Training Programme for Language Documentation in West Africa
Computational lexicography: a training programme for language documentation in West Africa Dafydd Gibbon1 and Nadine Borchardt2 1Universität Bielefeld, 2Humboldt-Universität Berlin 1 Training lexicographers for language documentation The goal of the present contribution is to provide an overview and a practical foundation for teaching the lexicographic aspects of language documentation for local languages. Perhaps paradoxically, most of the contribution will be somewhat abstract: for reasons of space, the choice is either to be highly selective with lots of examples (the approach usually taken), or to be comprehensive and highly structured (though intermediate approaches would also have been possible). Since systematic overviews do not exist yet for modern lexicography, we have opted for the second approach. The starting point for the contribution was the need to provide teaching materials for conducting practical training courses on lexicography in language documentation at the Université de Cocody, Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, and the University of Uyo, Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria.1 In each case, students have B.A. level training in all areas of linguistics, and consequently, the courses can concentrate on the lexicographic subdiscipline of lexicography in language documentation. The lexicographic application domains include lexicography for field linguistics, language teaching and speech technology, three fields which seem worlds apart, but which experience shows to haveat least some similar basic lexicographic requirements. The specific task which we address is the training of local lexicographers for local language documentation activities. Based on experience of lexicography in field linguistics, language teaching and speech technology (particularly text-to-speech synthesis), we clarify our basic terminology as follows: 1. -
7=SINO-INDIAN Phylosector
7= SINO-INDIAN phylosector Observatoire Linguistique Linguasphere Observatory page 525 7=SINO-INDIAN phylosector édition princeps foundation edition DU RÉPERTOIRE DE LA LINGUASPHÈRE 1999-2000 THE LINGUASPHERE REGISTER 1999-2000 publiée en ligne et mise à jour dès novembre 2012 published online & updated from November 2012 This phylosector comprises 22 sets of languages spoken by communities in eastern Asia, from the Himalayas to Manchuria (Heilongjiang), constituting the Sino-Tibetan (or Sino-Indian) continental affinity. See note on nomenclature below. 70= TIBETIC phylozone 71= HIMALAYIC phylozone 72= GARIC phylozone 73= KUKIC phylozone 74= MIRIC phylozone 75= KACHINIC phylozone 76= RUNGIC phylozone 77= IRRAWADDIC phylozone 78= KARENIC phylozone 79= SINITIC phylozone This continental affinity is composed of two major parts: the disparate Tibeto-Burman affinity (zones 70= to 77=), spoken by relatively small communities (with the exception of 77=) in the Himalayas and adjacent regions; and the closely related Chinese languages of the Sinitic set and net (zone 79=), spoken in eastern Asia. The Karen languages of zone 78=, formerly considered part of the Tibeto-Burman grouping, are probably best regarded as a third component of Sino-Tibetan affinity. Zone 79=Sinitic includes the outer-language with the largest number of primary voices in the world, representing the most populous network of contiguous speech-communities at the end of the 20th century ("Mainstream Chinese" or so- called 'Mandarin', standardised under the name of Putonghua). This phylosector is named 7=Sino-Indian (rather than Sino-Tibetan) to maintain the broad geographic nomenclature of all ten sectors of the linguasphere, composed of the names of continental or sub-continental entities. -
Language Documentation and Description
Language Documentation and Description ISSN 1740-6234 ___________________________________________ This article appears in: Language Documentation and Description, vol 12: Special Issue on Language Documentation and Archiving. Editors: David Nathan & Peter K. Austin Archiving grammatical descriptions SEBASTIAN NORDHOFF, HARALD HAMMARSTRÖM Cite this article: Sebastian Nordhoff, Harald Hammarström (2014). Archiving grammatical descriptions. In David Nathan & Peter K. Austin (eds) Language Documentation and Description, vol 12: Special Issue on Language Documentation and Archiving. London: SOAS. pp. 164- 186 Link to this article: http://www.elpublishing.org/PID/143 This electronic version first published: July 2014 __________________________________________________ This article is published under a Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC (Attribution-NonCommercial). The licence permits users to use, reproduce, disseminate or display the article provided that the author is attributed as the original creator and that the reuse is restricted to non-commercial purposes i.e. research or educational use. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ ______________________________________________________ EL Publishing For more EL Publishing articles and services: Website: http://www.elpublishing.org Terms of use: http://www.elpublishing.org/terms Submissions: http://www.elpublishing.org/submissions Archiving grammatical descriptions Sebastian Nordhoff and Harald Hammarström Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig 1. Introduction Language documentation projects produce and collect audio, video, and textual data, which they usually deposit in archives. Documenters’ understanding of best practices in archiving the primary content of their domain has made considerable progress over recent years. Methods for archiving derived content, such as dictionaries and especially grammatical descriptions, have received less attention. In this paper, we explore what the goals of archiving grammatical descriptions are, and what tasks an archive has to fulfill. -
Vocabulary of Shingnyag Tibetan: a Dialect of Amdo Tibetan Spoken in Lhagang, Khams Minyag
View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Prometheus-Academic Collections Asian and African Languages and Linguistics No.11, 2017 Vocabulary of Shingnyag Tibetan: A Dialect of Amdo Tibetan Spoken in Lhagang, Khams Minyag Suzuki, Hiroyuki IKOS, Universitetet i Oslo / National Museum of Ethnology Sonam Wangmo IKOS, Universitetet i Oslo Lhagang Town, located in Kangding Municipality, Ganzi Prefecture, Sichuan Province, China, is inhabited by many Tibetan pastoralists speaking varieties which are similar to Amdo Tibetan even though it is located at the Minyag Rabgang region of Khams, based on the Tibetan traditional geography. Among the multiple varieties spoken by inhabitants living in Lhagang Town, the Shingyag dialect is spoken in the south-western part of the town. It is somewhat different from other Amdo varieties spoken in Lhagang Town in the phonetic and phonological aspects. This article provides a word list with ca. 1500 words of Shingnyag Tibetan. Keywords: Amdo Tibetan, Minyag Rabgang, dialectology, migration pattern 1. Introduction 2. Phonological overview of Shingnyag Tibetan 3. Principal phonological features of Shingnyag Tibetan 1. Introduction This article aims to provide a word list (including ca. 1500 entries) with a phonological sketch of Shingnyag Tibetan, spoken in Xiya [Shing-nyag]1 Hamlet, located in the south-western part of Tagong [lHa-sgang] Town (henceforth Lhagang Town), Kangding [Dar-mdo] Municipality, Ganzi [dKar-mdzes] Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Sichuan Province, China (see Figure 1). Lhagang Town is in the easternmost part of Khams based on the traditional Tibetan geography, however, it is inhabited by many Tibetans whose mother tongue is Amdo Tibetan.2 Referring to Qu and Jin (1981), we can see that it is already known that Amdo-speaking Tibetans live in Suzuki, Hiroyuki and Sonam Wangmo. -
Review of Evidential Systems of Tibetan Languages
Zurich Open Repository and Archive University of Zurich Main Library Strickhofstrasse 39 CH-8057 Zurich www.zora.uzh.ch Year: 2017 Review of Lauren Gawne Nathan W. Hill (eds.). 2016. Evidential systems of Tibetan languages. Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area 40(2), 285–303 Widmer, Manuel DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/ltba.00002.wid Posted at the Zurich Open Repository and Archive, University of Zurich ZORA URL: https://doi.org/10.5167/uzh-168681 Journal Article Accepted Version Originally published at: Widmer, Manuel (2017). Review of Lauren Gawne Nathan W. Hill (eds.). 2016. Evidential systems of Tibetan languages. Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area 40(2), 285–303. Linguistics of the Tibeto- Burman Area, 40(2):285-303. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/ltba.00002.wid Review of Evidential systems of Tibetan languages Gawne, Lauren & Nathan W. Hill (eds.). 2016. Evidential systems of Tibetan languages. de Gruyter: Berlin. vi + 472 pp. ISBN 978-3-11-047374-2 Reviewed by Manuel Widmer 1 Tibetan evidentiality systems and their relevance for the typology of evidentiality The evidentiality1 systems of Tibetan languages rank among the most complex in the world. According to Tournadre & Dorje (2003: 110), the evidentiality systeM of Lhasa Tibetan (LT) distinguishes no less than four “evidential Moods”: (i) egophoric, (ii) testiMonial, (iii) inferential, and (iv) assertive. If one also takes into account the hearsay Marker, which is cOMMonly considered as an evidential category in typological survey studies (e.g. Aikhenvald 2004; Hengeveld & Dall’Aglio Hattnher 2015; inter alia), LT displays a five-fold evidential distinction. The LT systeM, however, is clearly not the Most cOMplex of its kind within the Tibetan linguistic area. -
On the Role and Utility of Grammars in Language Documentation and Conservation
View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by ScholarSpace at University of Hawai'i at Manoa Language Documentation & Conservation Special Publication No. 8 (July 2014): The Art and Practice of Grammar Writing, ed. by Toshihide Nakayama and Keren Rice, pp. 53-67 http://nflrc.hawaii.edu/ldc/ 4 http://hdl.handle.net/10125/4584 On the role and utility of grammars in language documentation and conservation Kenneth L. Rehg University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa The National Science Foundation warns that at least half of the world’s approximately seven thousand languages are soon to be lost. In response to this impending crisis, a new subfield of linguistics has emerged, called language documentation or, alternatively, documentary linguistics. The goal of this discipline is to create lasting, multipurpose records of endangered languages before they are lost forever. However, while there is widespread agreement among linguists concerning the methods of language documen- tation, there are considerable differences of opinion concerning what its products should be. Some documentary linguists argue that the outcome of language documentation should be a large corpus of extensively annotated data. Reference grammars and dictionaries, they contend, are the products of language description and are not essential products of language documentation. I argue, however, that grammars (and dictionaries) should normally be included in the documentary record, if our goal is to produce products that are maximally useful to both linguists and speakers, now and in the future. I also show that an appropri- ately planned reference grammar can serve as a foundation for a variety of community grammars, the purposes of which are to support and conserve threatened languages. -
Research Methods in Language Documentation
Research methods in language documentation Friederike Lüpke An increasing interest in linguistics may be noted among workers in anthropology, culture history, sociology, psychology, and philosophy. For all of them linguistics is of basic importance: its data and methods show better than those of any other discipline dealing with socialized behavior the possibility of a truly scientific study of society. Linguists should, on the other hand, become aware of what their science may mean for the interpretation of human conduct in general. (Sapir 1929: 207) 1. The new role of data Language documentation, understood as the creation of corpora of annotated and translated speech data in audio and video format, is a recently developed field of empirical linguistics (Himmelmann 1998, 2006a; Woodbury 2003). Since it owes its existence partly to rapidly evolving digital technologies for the recording, processing, and archiving of these data, it is not surprising that the main methodological focus so far has been on the form a documentation should take. Thus, we find explicit recommendations on such things as suitable data formats, form and content of metadata descriptions, minimally required levels of annotation, and access to and portability of data (Austin 2006; Bird & Simons 2003; Nathan & Austin 2004; Nathan 2006; Thieberger 2004; Wittenburg et al. 2002). This paper focuses on another central question for good practices in language documentation and description (henceforth LDD): what linguistic goals it can have and how methods of data collection are related to achieving these goals. By doing so, it joins a growing body of literature drawing attention to the various methodological challenges of LDD. -
The Spiti Valley Recovering the Past & Exploring the Present OXFORD
The Spiti Valley Recovering the Past & Exploring the Present Wolfson College 6 t h -7 t h May, 2016 OXFORD Welcome I am pleased to welcome you to the first International Conference on Spiti, which is being held at the Leonard Wolfson Auditorium on May 6 th and 7 th , 2016. The Spiti Valley is a remote Buddhist enclave in the Indian Himalayas. It is situated on the borders of the Tibetan world with which it shares strong cultural and historical ties. Often under-represented on both domestic and international levels, scholarly research on this subject – all disciplines taken together – has significantly increased over the past decade. The conference aims at bringing together researchers currently engaged in a dialogue with past and present issues pertaining to Spitian culture and society in all its aspects. It is designed to encourage interdisciplinary exchanges in order to explore new avenues and pave the way for future research. There are seven different panels that address the theme of this year’s conference, The Spiti Valley : Recovering the Past and Exploring the Present , from a variety of different disciplinary perspectives including, archaeology, history, linguistics, anthropology, architecture, and art conservation. I look forward to the exchange of ideas and intellectual debates that will develop over these two days. On this year’s edition, we are very pleased to have Professor Deborah Klimburg-Salter from the universities of Vienna and Harvard as our keynote speaker. Professor Klimburg-Salter will give us a keynote lecture entitled Through the black light - new technology opens a window on the 10th century . -
1 Seven Dimensions of Portability for Language Documentation And
1 Seven Dimensions of Portability for Language Documentation and Description Ý Steven Bird£ & Gary Simons £ University of Pennsylvania & University of Melbourne Ý SIL International Abstract: The process of documenting and describing the world’s languages is undergoing radical transformation with the rapid uptake of new digital technologies for capture, storage, annotation, and dissemination. While these technologies greatly enhance our ability to create digital data, their uncritical adoption has compromised our ability to preserve this data. Consequently, new digital language resources of all kinds – lexicons, interlinear texts, grammars, language maps, field notes, recordings – are difficult to reuse and less portable than the conventional printed resources they replace. This article is concerned with the portability of digital language resources, specifically with their ability to transcend computer environments, scholarly communities, domains of application, and the passage of time. We review existing software tools and digital technologies for language documentation and description, and analyze portability problems in the seven areas of content, format, discovery, access, citation, preservation, and rights. We articulate the values which underlie our intuitions about good and bad practices, and lay out an extensive ¼ set of recommendations to serve as a starting point for the community-wide discussion that we envisage. £ Bird & Simons, Language 79, 2003 (to appear) 2 1 Introduction. ‘Language documentation’ provides a record of the linguistic practices of a speech community, such as a collection of recorded and transcribed texts. ‘Language description,’ on the other hand, presents a systematic account of the observed practices in terms of linguistic generalizations and abstractions, such as in a grammar or analytical lexicon. -
Language Documentation
LLACAN Fieldwork Seminar January 2015 Defining language documentation Peter K. Austin Department of Linguistics SOAS, University of London © 2015 Peter K. Austin Creative commons licence Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs CC BY-NC-ND Outline • What is language documentation? • Background and developments • Documentation versus description • Project design, workflows and skills • Outcomes What is language documentation? • “concerned with the methods, tools, and theoretical underpinnings for compiling a representative and lasting multipurpose record of a natural language or one of its varieties” (Himmelmann 1998) • has developed over the last 20 years in response to the urgent need to make an enduring record of the world’s many endangered languages and to support speakers of these languages in their desire to maintain them, fuelled also by developments in information, media and communication technologies • concerned with roles of language speakers and communities and their rights and needs What it is not • it's not about collecting stuff to preserve it without analysing it • it's not = description + technology • it's not necessarily about endangered languages per se • it's not a passing trend Evidence Student interest 140 students graduated from SOAS MA in Language Documentation and Description 2004-14 – currently 20 are enrolled 10 graduates in PhD in Field Linguistics – 20 currently enrolled other documentation programmes, eg. UTAustin have similar experience Summer schools (3L, InField/Collang), training courses Publications Gippert -
Methodological Tools for Linguistic Description and Typology Ed
Language Documentation & Conservation Special Publication No. 16 (2019) Methodological Tools for Linguistic Description and Typology ed. by Aimée Lahaussois and Marine Vuillermet, pp. 5-30 http://nflrc.hawaii.edu/ldc http://hdl.handle.net/24855 2 Linguistic diversity, language documentation and psycholinguistics: The role of stimuli Birgit Hellwig University of Cologne Our psycholinguistic theories tend to be based on empirical data from a biased sample of well-described languages, not doing justice to the enormous linguistic diversity in the world. As Evans and Levinson (2009: 447) put it, a major challenge of our discipline is to harness this linguistic diversity and “to show how the child’s mind can learn and the adult’s mind can use, with approximately equal ease, any one of this vast range of alternative systems.” This paper explores some of the possibilities and limits of how language documentation and description can contribute to taking up this challenge, focusing on the role of both natural data and stimuli in this enterprise. Keywords: linguistic diversity; language documentation; psycholinguistics; data types; stimuli 1. Setting the scene: Linguistic diversity There are different estimates pertaining to the linguistic diversity in this world, but we can probably assume that there are around 7000 languages spoken today (e.g., Simons and Fennig 2017 give a number of 7099). These languages are unequally distributed across the world, with the largest diversity found in the tropical regions of America, Africa, Asia and the Pacific. At the same time, most of the world’s population speaks one of the larger lan- guages. The statistics provided by the Ethnologue allow us to estimate that the 10 largest languages are spoken by around half of the world’s population, and the 50 largest lan- guages by around 96% of the population.