LangDoc2015 course notes: Dafydd Gibbon

Course plan

1. Basics: Text linguistic foundations of language documentation
2. Basics: Spoken language documentation
3. Speech recording, transcription and annotation
4. Project report: Documentation of a language

1. Basics: Text linguistic foundations of language documentation

• 01-TextlingFoundationsOfLangDoc.odp (1,0M)
• 01-TextlingFoundationsOfLangDoc.pdf (1,1M)

Assignment: What is the text grammatical structure of a dictionary?

Document creation: stylesheet templates and information: You can use the text grammar principles for document formation to design your project report.

• Linguistics and Word Processing
• Linguistics stylesheet (doc)
• Linguistics stylesheet (odt)

Illustration of language group documentation:

1. DistGraph: an online tool for difference analysis and visualisation
   In response to a suggestion during Monday's class, in addition to the language pairs I have now implemented the lists of differences. Thanks for giving me the idea!

2. Basics: Spoken language documentation

1. See below for the course materials, with a link to the Praat website. Download and save the Praat for Windows ZIP file on your Desktop. Extract the contents of the ZIP file. You will then have a Praat folder on your Desktop, containing the Praat software.
2. Download the audio file below ("A tiger and a mouse were walking in a field" and save in the Praat folder.
3. Run Praat, and open the audio file in Praat.
4. The first part of the second section of the course will be concerned with
   1. The information about the speech signal which Praat provides.
   2. Annotation of the speech signal and understanding TextGrid files.
5. The next part of this section of the course will be concerned with automatically analysing TextGrid annotation files ('annotation mining') using the TGA online tool (see below).

1. Find the maximum, minimum and average syllable duration in the recording "The tiger and the mouse were walking in a field".
2. In order to do this:
   1. Annotate all the syllables in the recording on a tier called "Syllable".
   2. Save the TextGrid annotation file.
   3. Open the TextGrid annotation file in a text editor.
   4. Open the TGA online tool in a browser.
   5. Go to the "read-aloud Tem" demo. Delete the existing demo TextGrid and copy and paste your own TextGrid.
   6. Press the "TGA CALCULATE OUTPUT" button and examine the output to find the answer to the assignment question.

1. 02-BasicsOfSpokenLangDoc.odp (89K)
2. 02-BasicsOfSpokenLangDoc.pdf (156K)

1. Short Phonetics Course (Based on the Abidjan May 2014 course.)
2. Very short WAV file: tiger
3. Short WAV file: The tiger and the mouse were walking in a field."

1. Praat: doing phonetics by computer
2. Audacity: speech editor
3. Time Group Analyzer: an online tool for duration analysis
4. Recommended for annotation with Praat:
   SAMPA and X-SAMPA codes, the standard keyboard-friendly encoding of the IPA, from:
   Gibbon D. et al. Handbook of Multimodal and Spoken Language Systems. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

3. Project report: Documentation of a language

Various sources

1. Dialectometry:
   D. Gibbon: Visualisation of distances between languages (ODT)
   D. Gibbon: Visualisation of distances between languages (PDF)
2. Connell, B., F. Ahoua, D. Gibbon. 2002. Illustrations of the IPA: Ega. JIPA.
3. Krauwer's BLARK concept (Basic Language Resource Kit)
4. Ega documentation archive