User:Rkamal1/Language selection
I am a CS major, so I would like to partner up with someone who is more familiar with linguistics. I have no preference as to who exactly that someone may be. In terms of languages, my ranked preferences are: Central Kurdish, Gurani, and Mazandarani. All of these are Indo-Iranian languages, which is the broad family of languages I am interested in working with.
Central Kurdish
- ISO 639-3: ckb [1]
- Status: Provincial (2)
- Script: Variant of Arabic
- No. of speakers: 4 million
Central/Sorani Kurdish is mostly spoken in the Kurdistan Autonomous Region of Iraq, but it is also popular in Iran and parts of Sweden [2]. It is agglutinative and "highly inflectional," using both prefixes and suffixes [3]. Interestingly, the language has no grammatical gender.
I have a personal connection to the language as it is my native tongue, which makes it my first preference. On the other hand, it is an official language of Iraq [4] and has some Apertium support, so it may not be the quintessential under-resourced language for the purposes of this course. In particular, I cannot develop a morphological analyzer for the language, as one already exists. Still, I am listing it because Prof. Washington hinted at his willingness to make exceptions where there are personal reasons to choose a language.
Resources
It is very easy to find texts for Sorani Kurdish from sources such as dictionaries [5] and newspapers [6].
Gurani
- ISO 639-3: hac [7]
- Status: Shifting (7)
- Script: Variant of Arabic
- No. of speakers: 300,000
Gurani is spoken in villages near the Iraq-Iran border such as Hewraman and Kermanshah. It is a variety of Kurdish that is similar to but not mutually comprehensible with the Sorani dialect. Its morphology is agglutinative and inflectional (with prefixes and suffixes) [8].
Resources
Many authentic texts in Gurani come in the form of epic poems and religious scripture, such as the Ahl-e-Haqq (I am not sure how to access this online, but I may be able to find it with the help of the Professor/TA). There is an OLAC Record mainly for IPA transcriptions of Gurani audio [9].
