Difference between revisions of "Language selection"

Revision as of 20:07, 8 November 2016

Everyone should choose a language with at least some interesting morphological processes. Note: If you have a strong desire to work on language that is normally regarded as entirely "isolating", some accommodations may be made, but you should talk with the professor about it immediately.

Languages you may not choose

• No languages supported by Google translate, however poor-quality.
• No languages supported by Apertium. Check the following places:
  • full list of language pairs
  • all stable language modules
  • incubator - includes some language modules not in the above

Note: If you really want, you may select a language in Apertium's incubator, but you will basically be expected to start from scratch for each assignment and ignore what's available from Apertium except to augment your resources later

• No languages supported by Giellatekno.

Places to look for corpora

• Start by seeing what a Google search for resources on your language turns up.
• List of Wikipedias by language - you probably want at least 1000 articles for it to be useful for this class, but somewhat smaller wikipedias can also work if there are other resources
• See if you can find a whole or partial bible translation, e.g.
  • Institute for Bible Translation - mostly languages of Russia
  • bible.is - a whole bunch of bible translations
  • potentially available in print or on microfilm from a library (check worldcat, use ILL)
• If you can figure out enough of your language to do an internet search for resources in it, you may be able to find news, entertainment, or informational websites. Also try searching for materials in another "big" language that speakers might also know (e.g., speakers of Shor may not know English, but basically all of them will know Russian, so you may only find resources made available by native speakers that are in Russian, or at least introduced in Russian).
• Try a library search for literature in the language. You may have to know both some of the language and how American and Western European libraries have historically transliterated it. You have essentially the whole world's library resources available to you through ILL, if you do it right.
• Ask someone. Look online, around campus, etc. for native speakers, linguists and language experts, activists, or anyone else who might know something about the language, including even just where to find resources.
• If your language is particularly small, there may be nothing or nearly nothing available in the language. If you can't find any print materials either, consider choosing another language for this class. We will do some probing of our languages similar to what's done in linguistic fieldwork, but it will all be done through written material—the expectation is that we will not be able to rely on native speaker consultants for our work in the class.

Random list of languages that might work

• Western Abenaki
• Kalmyk
• Blackfoot
• Xhosa
• Georgian
• Chamorro
• Lakota
• Shor