Tag Archives: lexical data

Converting Streitberg’s Gothic Dictionary to a CLDF Wordlist on a Windows System

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I recently converted the Gothic dictionary written by Wilhelm Streitberg to a CLDF wordlist. Since I was using Windows, I had some difficulties during the conversion progress, which Unix system users may not have to deal with. I thought it would be useful to share my experience here and point out that users of Windows operating systems should be aware of certain aspects when converting data to CLDF.

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When the macaw teaches you to eat the Brazil nut: A concept list for the study of Tupían languages

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This is a joint post by Fabrício Ferraz Gerardi, Carolina Coelho Aragon, and Stanislav Reichert.

Whereas the choice of vocabulary needed for analyses in computational historical linguistics is often determined by criteria like stability and resistance to borrowing, one might also be interested in culturally relevant concepts because of their value for reconstructing the proto-culture and even population movements of individual language families. Having striven to find concepts to which these criteria apply within the Tupían language family, we came up with a list of 447 concepts. This post presents the complete list and then briefly illustrates some of the criteria employed in choosing them.

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Computer-Assisted Comparison of Gelong and Hlai using Cross-Linguistic Data Formats

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In this study, we discuss the sparsely studied Gelong language of Hainan Island and its affiliation to the Hlai languages. Our work is based on Andy Chin’s article “The Gelong Language in the Multilingual Hub of Hainan”. We extracted Chin’s data and processed it with the help of various computer-assisted methods in order to make it more accessible, machine-readable, and comparable with other datasets.

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A multilingual body part concept list

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In the summer of 2018, I set out to collect data for my master’s thesis (Tjuka 2019). The goal was to elicit body part terms that can also refer to object and landscape features. This was BC (before COVID-19), so I was able to meet with informants living in Berlin at the time and conduct my urban fieldwork study. The informants who participated in the study spoke one of 13 different languages (e.g., Wolof, Vietnamese, Czech). As a first task, I elicited 28 body part terms to get a sense of the naming patterns in each language. This blog post provides background information and introduces the resulting multilingual body part concept list.

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A list of 171 body part concepts

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The body of most human beings consist of similar parts such as a head, arms, legs, and so on. Many body parts also occur in animals. The shapes and functions of body parts are universal across cultures, but speakers of various languages choose to categorize the body differently. For example, Vietnamese has a single word (tay) for the concepts HAND and ARM. The universality of the human body and its categorization into different parts have attracted attention across research areas such as lexical typology and cognitive science. Therefore, I present a comprehensive list of human and animal body part terms based on German which were mapped to the concepts in the Concepticon (List et al. 2020). The list is intended for investigations on cross-linugistic naming patterns of body parts.

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Why Tag Markup may be Useful for Lexical Data

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In lexicography, there are two commonly used types of semantic data categorization: semantic domains and semantic labels. The difference between the two approaches is simple: semantic domains presume that each lexical meaning belongs to one and only one group (or sub-group of a larger group). Semantic labels do not have such limitations.

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New Lexical Data for the Kusunda Language

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Endangered language documentation and endangered language revitalisation have been two hot topics in recent years. For instance, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) declared the year 2019 as the International Year of Indigenous Languages. However, although the UNESCO and many other organizations (e.g. The Endangered Languages Documentation Programme or SIL International) urge the public to be aware of the rapidly decreasing number of languages in the world, it does not slow down the annual rate of language loss. For example, the total number of speakers of the Kusunda language, a moribund language spoken in Nepal, decreased to only one person in 2020.

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From Fieldwork to Trees 3: CLDF recipes

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In the previous two posts (Part 1, Part 2), I took you from a matrix of word lists from fieldwork to a LingPy-compatible CLDF Wordlist with cognate codes and alignments. We can now feed this dataset into existing tools and recipes for visualizing and analyzing CLDF Wordlists.

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From Fieldwork to Trees 2: Cognate coding

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In a previous post (Kaiping 2018), I described how to convert matrix-shape word lists given in Excel into the long format LingPy and other software can work with. My motivation for this was to provide my colleague Yunus Sulistyono with a good way to compare the lexicon of his Alorese [alor1247] dialects, and to understand the relationship between them. In this post, the data is automatically cognate coded and converted into CLDF. Continue reading →

From Fieldwork to Trees 1: Data preparation

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A colleague of mine has recently returned from his fieldwork, where he collected data on on the dialectal variation of the Alorese language of Alor and Pantar in the East Nusa Tenggara province of Indonesia. He collected data on 13 Alorese varieties, including word list data. One obvious step for comparing the dialects is to mark which forms are obviously cognate and then use a standard tree (or network) construction algorithm to display the shared signal in the data. With standard tools and a bit of Python glue, this is an easy task. A script for 3 steps can be found in my repository on github. In this first part, I will describe how to get an Excel file into a format LingPy can deal with.

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Extracting translation data from the Wiktionary project

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Wiktionary is a project for creating a multilingual, web-based free dictionary of all words in all languages. Like its sister project Wikipedia, since its inception it has been subject to criticism both in terms of its lexicographic approaches and in terms of reliability, content, procedures, and community operation (see Lepore 2006, Fuertes-Olivera 2009, Meyer 2012). Faults have also been pointed in terms of its structure which is confusing for newcomers, with parallel and unaligned information shared among the various language dictionaries, and differences in accuracy and depth among languages. Notwithstanding, data from Wiktionary is routinely employed with successful results in natural language processing and, occasionally, in linguistic research (see Otte 2011, Schlippe 2012, Medero 2009, Li 2012), as it constitutes, by far, the largest free multilingual lexical source.

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