User:Mchapma1/Language selection
With whom I would like to work
- Needs to be a Bi-Co student
- Someone who is interested in German dialects
- Someone who is interested in Cross Serial Dependencies (I.e.[1] Hans Mary Max swim jump run" being grammatical)
Language Selection
Swiss german, Zürich
Morphological Typology
Swiss German, Zürich is an analytic language. It has morphemes for gender and case, uses distinct helping verbs for tense.
Swiss German is famous for constructions like "Hans Mary Max swim jump run" which are grammatical. It has contributed a lot to the question of whether natural language is context free.
Basic Information
ISO: GSW.
Most Swiss german speakers are also literate, and/or speak swiss standard german, which is nearly identical to Standard german as spoken in Germany. As a highly educated and multilingual nation most speakers also speak French (and/or italian), and English.
Available Corpora
There are a number of resources for Swiss german, the difficult challenge is locating data specific to Zürich. For general Swiss German data we have resources like Wikipedia [2].
There are also numerous other corpuses like the Swiss SMS corpus[3].
Romansh
Basic Info
The Romansh language is spoken in Switzerland by about 30,000 speakers. While it is a small language it is an official language in a number of Kantons and is taught in schools. Most data for the language is written in the official Sursilvan dialect of the language. As this is a language spoken in the highly developed and well educated nation of Switzerland most speakers are fluent in Swiss Standard German and are able to read and speak English and French to some extent. As well, many Swiss from the Zürich area have vacation homes in the valley that the language is spoken in, thus most speakers are in regular contact with other languages.
Romansh is a romance language, but shares much of its vocabulary with German and French through long contact between the people of the region and outsiders.
ISO: rom
Morphological Typology
Romansh is a romance language and has morphological distinctions for Gender(Masculine and Feminine) and Plurality. Determiners and adjectives are modified by the gender and plurality of their commanding noun. Gender is marked via the suffix -a sometimes with the infix -èss-. Plurality is marked with -s or -I. Words that end in /ʦ/ do not mark plurality. There are also collective nouns which cannot be counted. Notably there is a distinction between a natural pair and collective pair, as can be seen in "traja pèra cazès" vs "trajs pèrs majla" where "pera" is only used for collective nouns that are pairs (I.e. Shoes, glasses, etc).
Available Corpus
There are a number of books and dictionaries written in Romansh as well as a number of teaching resources and grammars with large corpuses available. As well the Swiss SMS corpus also has a small amount of data for Romansh.
Plattdeutsch
Basic Info
Plattdeutsch (Low German), is a germanic language spoken by about 2 million native speakers. Because modern speech communities are almost entirely in Germany, almost all speakers speak Standard German as well as Low German.
ISO: nds
Morphological Typology
Low German has a three genders, five tenses, and adjectival distinctions between oblique and non oblique nouns when modifying them. As well, there is morphological marking for the case of words. Lowca german marks the dative case with a suffixed -e on nouns.
Available Corpus
There are numerous resources for Low German as it is has a large speech community. There are books, dictionaries and other resources written in the language and many have Standard German translations available for comparison.
