Author Archives: Ben Sapirstein

About Ben Sapirstein

Ben Sapirstein is a researcher and master’s student in Computer Science at Reichman University. Ben’s research advances the study of Semitic languages through efforts in standardization, annotation, and applied computational use cases. He is passionate about developing linguistic resources and tools that foster cross-linguistic understanding and make linguistic knowledge more accessible.

Standardizing Phonetic Transcriptions for Kitchen et al.’s Comparative Wordlist on Semitic Languages with Language-Specific Orthography Profiles

Comparative wordlists are a fundamental tool for tracing language history, allowing us to see how languages are related, much like biologists use DNA to infer phylogenies of species. When linguists compile data from different sources, scholars often code lexical data differently, using individual transcription systems that cannot be directly compared with each other. In order to make such data comparable, individual transcription systems must be unified in order to reflect a common standard. This study illustrates how such unification can be done by taking a particularly diverse dataset on Semitic languages as example and illustrating how transcriptions for individual language varieties can be harmonized as part of the general standardization workflow proposed by the Cross-Linguistic Data Formats initiative.

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