Software matter(s)

My documentation activity will heavily rely on the use of software. 

For text transcription I will use PRAAT, a speech analysis tool developed by computational linguists and phoneticians at the University of Amsterdam. PRAAT allows time-aligned transcripts contained in tiers with the support of various kind of sound analysis such as wave forms, intensity, tone an formants. This will greatly assist my phonetic transcription, but I will also use it for the orthographic transcription and the translation.

I will export whatever is elaborated with PRAAT into ELAN. It is a tool developed at the Max Planck Institute initially for the study of sign language, but that is nowadays widely used for grammatical glossing. The text also in this case is time-aligned with tiers containing various grammatical information, such as morphological glosses and the indication of part of speech. I will probably limit to these two. In particular, I will make use of a special version of ELAN, ELAN-Corpa, developed at the French CNRS research laboratory LLACAN by Christian Chanard and his collaborators, that allows semi-automatic glossing. In short, one associate a lexeme or a morpheme to a gloss for the first time and this automatically appears when it meets the lexeme or the morpheme again without typing again. This is valid for all the tiers and has the result to create a grammatical glossary. It is a fantastic tools that allows saving a lot of time in a quite tedious operation.

The glossary can be exported to other tools for the creation of a proper dictionary. These are Flex (Fieldword Language Explore) and WeSay. Both software have been created by SIL and run only on Windows (PRAAT and ELAN have versions for Mac, Windows and Linux). In order to create a comfortable interface, I plan to install an emulator in my Mac so that I have one machine with two virtual machines, one with Mac and one with Windows.

Another tool for sound editing is Audacity, an intuitive software widely used for linguists for their work. 

All mentioned software are freely downloadable and we have to be grateful to creators and developers, as well as those who provide funds, to make them available to everyone. I myself have spreading their use when I been teaching how to use them in courses at Addis Ababa University in 2008-2010, with great profit for my students.

I write on software and I became even more excited about the success in this documentary research project  on Nara! 

    


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Basic info in the Nara language (from Banti and Savà (2021). Nara phonology. Rassegna di Studi Etiopici - 3^ Serie - Vol. 5: 235-268).

Nara (ISO code nrb), is a Nilo-Saharan language regarded as belonging to the Northern East Sudanic family together with the Nubian, Tama and Nyimang groups (Güldemann, 2018: 235-309; Dimmendaal  et al. , 2019: 326 ff.). Rilly (2010) has shown that also the ancient Meroitic language probably belonged to this family. The language and its speech community are also known with the older name Barya ( ባርያ , Baria, Barea), which already occurs as an ethnic name in inscriptions of the Axumite king  c Ezana who reigned from 330 to 365-370 CE ca. In Eritrea this name has been replaced by Nara (also Nera), in order to avoid the derogatory meaning “slave”, “one who is in service of a demon”, which  barya  acquired in major Ethiosemitic languages such as Ge’ez, Amharic and Tigrinya, because the Nara-speaking communities were frequently raided for capturing slaves by their more powerful neighbours  [1] . In Sudan, however,  Bāryā  or  al-Bāryā  (  البا...
Read more

Real first day of work

Eventually yesterday I could meet only one of my collaborators and only in the headquarter of the Wycliffe Ethiopia Foundation. Here they are active in translating the Bible in several languages of Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa. I met the responsible for the translation of the Bible in Nara, who is not a linguist and does not know Nara, but speaks the languages needed to communicate with the Nara experts. He asked me to help him to find the right solutions to represent tone in the orthography that they will adopt, something that perfectly fits with what I wanted to do first, an analysis of tone. We started this morning, and also the second collaborator was there. He resulted to have a better linguistic capacity than the other one. He is a Koya dialect speaker by birth and we worked with the variant. We went through a book on elementary teaching of Nara, as I had planned, worked on nouns asking plurals and tones, and I gave suggestions on when and where marking high tone in order to d...
Read more

Habesha k'etero (Ethiopian appointment)

Waiting for my two Nara collaborators who should have been here fifty minutes ago to start working. I met the main one yesterday for the first time. It is a lovely person that is committed to help me in all possible ways to make this research a success. He speaks the Mogoreeb Nara dialect, while the second consultant can help be with Higir, Kyota and Santoorta. I am, therefore, in the ideal position to make a comparative description of all four Nara varieties. On the other hand, I must be careful not to mix the replies and make sure we are talking about this or that dialect. I will start showing a pedagogical book for teaching Nara published by the Eritrean Ministry of education. There are words associated to images and some grammatical structures and pronouns. I plan to ask for the translation, the plural of nouns and the tones, without recording for the first day for not impressing them immediately with the technological equipment. I need first of all to train my hear with tones. The...
Read more