Difference between revisions of "User:WDENGLE1/Language selection"

Latest revision as of 08:06, 29 January 2022

Elizabeth and I have agreed to work together this semester. WDENGLE1 (talk) 17:48, 23 January 2022 (EST)

We'll be working on Mixe. See below for other languages I considered.

Ngaanyatjarra

• ISO 639-3: ntj.
• An indigenous language of Western Australia, particularly Warburton.
• about 1,100 native speakers (as of 2016 census).
• Morphological typology: synthetic? (the WP article refers to afixation).
• Written exclusively in the Latin script without diacritics, so encoding text/a keyboard layout should be trivial (just use English's).

Sources

• Wikipedia article (contains some general info).
• Ngaanyatjarra's entry in the Australian Indigenous Languages Database refers to some grammatical descriptions and sources of text, but I'm not sure how to access/find them.
• Ngaanyatjarra–English dictionary available at UPenn, can we obtain this via Quaker Consortium? (paper/probable DRM, probably inaccessible, machine-readability Highly unlikely).
• A Ngaanyatjarra–English wordlist presented as an HTML table, accessible and should be machine parsable.
• A small English dictionary of Western Desert terms:Ngaanyatjarra is part of the Western Desert language family. PDF, has a text layer, probably harder to machine-parse.
• Bible translations in various formats (the easiest for machine and my readability appear to be Epub/HTML).
• A pre-reading booklet for children, PDF appears to have an (at least somewhat complete) text layer but should be visually verified.
• Some books in Ngaanyatjarra collected by the Goldfields Aboriginal Language Centre: website is tricky accessibility-wise, might be worth contacting them for more resources if I work on this language.

Low German

• ISO 639-3: nds.
• West Germanic language variety spoken mainly in Northern Germany, with closely related dialects spoken in the northeastern part of the Netherlands.
• The language is referred to in itself as Plattdütsch among other names.
• Estimated 4.35–7.15 million native speakers.
• Morphological classification: synthetic (declension of adjectives/nouns and conjugation of verbs described on enwp).
• Latin script/based on German orthography (SASS writing style) so the German keyboard layout should suffice.

Sources

• English Wikipedia article.
• Deepl translator has some support for this language via its (high) German rules. Certainly enough to get the gist of text, though struggles significantly with idioms.
• Low German Wikipedia with over 83,000 articles and 62 users active within the past month.
• Low German phrasebook at Wikivoyage.
• Plattmakers, an online Low German dictionary (with UI and translations in English).

Balinese

• ISO 639-3: ban.
• Malayo-Polynesian language spoken on the Indonesian island of Bali as well as Northern Nusa Penida, Western Lombok, Eastern Java, Southern Sumatra, and Sulawesi.
• Native speakers: 3.3 million (as of 2000 census).
• Morphological typology: synthetic?
• Written both in Latin script and in its own script, though primarily older texts are written in the latter. This could pose challenges (my screen reader reads Balinese characters as hex codes).

Sources

• English Wikipedia article.
• Balinese Wikipedia with over 11,400 articles and 45 users active within the past month.
• Tom Whitman at Swarthmore, director of the Balinese Gamelan, might have resources. I can reach out if I work on this language (he knows who I am as I played in gamelan last semester).