Humans Who Read Grammars

Hedvig has written o n how Ethnologue has become even more restricted than it already was , and what resources are out there that could be used instead. One of the things I miss from Ethnologue are its maps - although at least recently it was still possible to access most of these, by downloading them instead of viewing them on your browser. In her post, Hedvig points out that Langscape can be used instead, and that's all great. But what if you wanted to draw a map yourself? Especially one which you intend to publish? Some institutions may have access to the World Language Mapping System  (WLMS), which lies at the core of Ethnologue's (and Langscape's) maps, and was made by Global Mapping International ( which recently was closed, and now the WLMS is back formally with SIL ). I'm not sure about the details (and the user agreement parts of the WLMS website are down), but paying a lot of money for the WLMS must enable users to draw their own maps and publish them, as ...

Hedvig in her office in Canberra figuring this out and writing this guide. Here is another guide for how to do something practical in ELAN. Previously, we relayed Eri Kashima's guide for sensible auto-segmentation with PRAAT and ELAN (time saver!). (For all posts about fieldwork on this blog, see this tag. ) This time: how to take your search results and make the matching annotations into new separate tier(s). This is useful if you for example want to cycle through only the annotations that match a certain search query in transcription mode. This post has a longer guide, and a short guide at the end. You can also use this guide if you want to compare several different transcriptions with each other, for example older and newer versions or if you are collaborating with different people. In that case, start from step (4). For those who don't do a lot of transcription : ELAN ( E UDICO  L inguistic  An notator) is a program from TLA at MPI-Nijmegen. This program allow...

A typical recording situation from my own fieldwork.  Melenesa (my research assistant) and Ta'alolo (one of my informants) in Neiafu-Tai village on Savai'i, in Samoa. Keeping on the theme of linguistic fieldwork (see Jeremy's previous post about his fieldwork experiences here here and Jesse's post about measuring nasality with earbuds here) , I've also got something for you! Two colleagues of mine in the Wellsprings of Linguistic Diversity project, Eri Kashima and Mark Ellison, have figured out a neat way of saving time on segmenting up sound files for transcription. Linguistic fieldwork is so much more than just the time spent in the field site, when you come home there's a lot of work that needs to be done with annotating your files, segmenting them up and in different other ways preparing them for the analysis you want to do. Yours truly, handling transcription files in ELAN in her office in Coombs, Canberra. One thing that takes a lot of time, a...

Nasal leakage: It's a real condition affecting field linguists around the world. Does the language you work on have nasal sounds? Rhetorical question! Of course, it does! Even if nasality is a non-contrastive feature of a language, air finds its way out through the schnoz one way or another during language production [ WALS; nasality ] . There's no stopping the all-knowing nose . While the burning question on everyone's mind is, if the magnificent bone structure of Worf's forehead is connected to his nasal cavity, what kind of resonance can we expect, there's a more pressing issue here (yes, really). A survey of 372[1] grammars listed on the Grammar Watch List of the Association of Linguistic Typology revealed that empirical bases for claims regarding nasality are virtually non-existent. In cases were nasality was described, they were solely based on impressionistic observations. The reasons for this in the past had often been just; equipment for ...