A Web-Accessible Dictionary of Southeastern Pomo Charles B. Chang, Shira Katseff, Russell Lee-Goldman, Marta Piqueras-Brunet, and Yao Yao 18 th International.

A Web-Accessible

Dictionary of Southeastern

PomoCharles B. Chang, Shira Katseff, Russell Lee-

Goldman, Marta Piqueras-Brunet, and Yao Yao

18th International Congress of Linguists21 July 2008

University of California, Berkeley

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Outline

1. Background

2. Dictionary structure

3. Behind the scenes: mySQL, XML, XSL

4. Searches: words, audio, texts

5. Future work

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Background: Southeastern Pomo (SEP)

Southeastern Pomo (Northern Hokan, Pomoan) is an acutely endangered language historically spoken in the area around Clear Lake, CA (Moshinsky 1974, Gordon 2005).

Speakers/learners are mostly affiliated with the Elem Pomo Tribe. Only two fluent speakers

remain.

Haynie (2007

)

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Background: Southeastern Pomo (SEP) Revitalization efforts are underway, led

by Loretta Kelsey and Robert Geary (cf. Shavelson 2006, Fagan 2007), and have resulted in:

community orthographyteaching materials language campsprint dictionary with pictures of flora & fauna

Another component of documentation and revitalization work: a web-accessible dictionary.

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Background: online dictionaries As resources for linguistic analysis have

entered cyberspace, so have the products of linguistic documentation (cf. Babel et al. 2006, Dick & Haynes 2006).

Online dictionaries have been created for a number of languages native to the Americas (e.g. Yurok, Hupa, Northern Paiute, Washo).

These online dictionaries make the information gathered through fieldwork on these languages accessible to researchers, tribe members, and in particular, young learners.

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Outline

1. Background

2. Dictionary structure

3. Behind the scenes: mySQL, XML, XSL

4. Searches: words, audio, texts

5. Future work

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Dictionary structure Three main parts:

1. lexicon entries for individual affixes, words, and fixed

expressions entry displays the following information about an

item: transcription part of speech gloss links to sound clips in the audio dictionary (if

available) different lexicon entries correspond to different

forms, but not necessarily different lexemes

2. audio dictionary entry for each audio file clipped out for a lexicon

entry

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Dictionary structure Three main parts:

3. texts database entries for elicited sentences, narratives,

and other discourse above the sentence level

entry displays the following information about an item: speaker genre transcriptions of individual sentences free translations interlinear glosses

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Outline

1. Background

2. Dictionary structure

3. Behind the scenes: mySQL, XML, XSL

4. Searches: words, audio, texts

5. Future work

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Entering data into a mySQL database Lexicon entries are made in a mySQL

database with fields for: transcription variants (if any) community orthography (if available) part of speech free gloss & interlinear gloss semantic domain source file & start time links to other morphologically related

entries notes

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Entering data into a mySQL database Desirable features:

automatically generates ID numbers for entries

fully sortable and searchable allows several researchers to make/edit

entries at the same time without overwriting each other’s work

easily exportable to XML (eXtensible Markup Language) format

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Displaying XML with XSL When the database is exported to XML,

the data becomes essentially text. Sample XML for a lexicon entry:

<lemma> <id>101</id> <lx>kachuchu</lx>

<community_orthography>kuchechoo</community_orthography>

<ps>n</ps> <ge>cap</ge> <short-gloss>cap</short-gloss> <ref>21sep06_LK1b</ref> <time>18:39</time> <sd>clothes</sd> <is-headword>yes</is-headword>

</lemma>

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Displaying XML with XSL Such a text format allows the data to be

easily manipulated into other formats as the technology of documentation changes over time.

A separate XSL (eXtensible Stylesheet Language) file controls how the data from the XML file is displayed.

Summary of what goes on in a dictionary query:

QUERY XML

XSL

DISPLAY

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Outline

1. Background

2. Dictionary structure

3. Behind the scenes: mySQL, XML, XSL

4. Searches: words, audio, texts

5. Future work

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The sounds of Southeastern Pomo Consonant inventory of SEP:

LAB DEN ALV PAL VEL P-VEL GLp p’ b t M t M’ t t’ d k k’ q q’ ʔ

ts ts’ (tʃ tʃ’) f s ʃ x χ

h m n (ŋ) ɾ l w j

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The sounds of Southeastern Pomo Linguistic orthography of SEP consonants:

LAB DEN ALV PAL VEL P-VEL GLp p’ b th th’ t t’ d k k’ q q’ 7

ts ts’ (ch ch’) f s sh x X

h m n (ng) r l w y

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The sounds of Southeastern Pomo Vowel inventory of SEP:

FRONT CENTRAL BACKi (ɪ) u (ʊ)e (ɛ) (ə) o

a (ɐ)

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The sounds of Southeastern Pomo Linguistic orthography of SEP vowels:

FRONT CENTRAL BACKi ue o

a

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Sample dictionary queries Word searches

“What does lq’olq’okin mean?” “How do you say ‘red’ in SEP?” “What are some kinship terms in SEP?”

Audio searches “I want to hear all the words that

contain the cluster /mf/.” Text searches

“I want to see all the contexts in which the word mko ‘see’ appears.”

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Outline

1. Background

2. Dictionary structure

3. Behind the scenes: mySQL, XML, XSL

4. Searches: words, audio, texts

5. Future work

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Future work In the near future, we hope to:

add different types of multimedia (e.g. photos of local flora & fauna, videos of the actions described by verbs of motion and placement)

have multimedia display within the same window as the lexicon entry

merge the data of the print dictionary with that of the online dictionary

update all entries with their spelling in the Elem orthography

have teachers and learners make use of this as a CALL (Computer-Aided Language Learning) tool

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Thank you!

Acknowledgements:Jocelyn Ahlers ◆ Zhenya Antić ◆ Thera Crane ◆

Donna FentonAndrew Garrett ◆ Robert Geary ◆ Hannah HaynieLeanne Hinton ◆ Jisup Hong ◆ Loretta Kelsey ◆

Julius MoshinskyLindsey Newbold ◆ Ronald Sprouse ◆ Maziar

ToosarvandaniCorey Yoquelet ◆ UCB Linguistics

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ReferencesBabel, Molly, Andrew Garrett, Erin Haynes, Michael Houser, Reiko Kataoka,

Fanny Liu, Nicole Marcus, Ruth Rouvier, Ronald Sprouse, Ange Strom-Weber, and Maziar Toosarvandani. 2006. A web-accessible Mono Lake Paiute dictionary and text archive. Paper presented at the Friends of Uto-Aztecan Conference. Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah, August 24.

Dick, Grace, and Erin Haynes. 2006. A web-accessible Mono Lake Paiute dictionary and text archive. Paper presented at the Great Basin Language Conference. Bishop, CA, October 21.

Fagan, Kevin. 2007. Only living Elem Pomo speaker teaches so she won’t be the last. San Francisco Chronicle, September 30. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file= /c/a/2007/09/30/MNAISEMAH.DTL. Retrieved 1 July 2008.

Gordon, Raymond G., Jr., ed. 2005. Ethnologue: Languages of the World, 15th edition. Dallas, TX: SIL International. Online version: http://www.ethnologue.com.

Haynie, Hannah. 2007. Southeastern Pomo. http://hjhaynie.berkeley.edu/ southeasternpomo. Retrieved 5 November 2007.

Moshinsky, Julius. 1974. A Grammar of Southeastern Pomo. University of California Publications in Linguistics 72. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Shavelson, Lonny. 2006. California tribe tries to save its language. Voice of America News, March 30. http://www.voanews.com/english/archive/2006-03/2006-03-30-voa46. cfm?CFID=88126261&CFTOKEN=81958375. Retrieved 1 October 2006.