User:Jspring1/Language selection

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I'd like to work with someone who knows linguistics well.

Beja (Bidhaawyeet)

Morphological topology

Beja is simultaneously agglutinative and inflectional, in some cases. This means that individual morphemes are concatenated to form both the semantic and grammatical meaning of a word. For example, Beja shows its structure in the word raatamnày, 'we ask each other' (raat-, meaning to ask; -am-, referring to the reciprocal; and -này, the present tense.[1]

Background

The language of Beja is an afroasiatic of the Cushitic branch. It is spoken by the Beja people on the western coast of the Red Sea.[2] There are approximately two million speakers, living mostly in the north-west of Africa, bordering the Red Sea. Thus, speakers may also speak Arabic. No normative orthography was created for the language until the 20th century. Both Roman and Arabic script have been used to write the language.

ISO codes 639-2 bej and 639-3 bej.

See footnotes in reference [2] for reference to 140 pages of written Beja. See [3].

Alemannisch

Morphological topology

Alemannic appears to be a fusional language, similar to German. [4][5] These means that a single morpheme may contain information from many categories. Additionally, since the morphemes are not simply concatenated together, the root may be difficult to extract. [4]

Background

Alemannic is a branch of the Germanic language family, spoken by roughly ten million people across Switzerland, Austria, Germany, Liechtenstein, France, Italy, Venezuela, and the United States. Many consider the language simply a dialect of German. Uses the same orthography as German.

ISO codes 639-2 gsw and 639-3 gct, gsw, swg, wae.

According to a quick search on Wikipedia, there are many published sources of text for this language.

Kabardian

Morphological topology

This language appears to have an agglutinative structure, meaning that morphemes are concatenated together to form words of unique meaning.

Background

Approximately 1.6 million people spanning across Circassia, Turkey, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq speak this language, according to a 2005–2010 census. Thus, speakers may also speak Arabic or Russian. The language is written in a form of Cyrillic, though previously, Latin and Arabic scripts have been used. [6]

See [7] for examples of written text. Authentic examples seem readily accessible.

ISO codes 639-2 kbd and 639-3 kbd.


[1] https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=gaktTQ8vq28C&oi=fnd&pg=PA447&dq=Beja+Morphology&ots=g5m69Vh1ok&sig=cPMfbQEVYYM5ugOo8_MOEXiv-3k#v=onepage&q=Beja%20Morphology&f=false

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beja_language

[3] http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.319777

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alemannic_German

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusional_language

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kabardian_language

[7] https://books.google.com/books?id=5FsLlweDug8C&pg=PA203&lpg=PA203&dq=Kabardian+text&source=bl&ots=nwqMbWM9_V&sig=1bC-nWJ_EuRXSlJBILvlLhASa3Q&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjd8dnJn_LYAhWIoFMKHWDQD3MQ6AEIWTAL#v=onepage&q=Kabardian%20text&f=false