Jason D. Patent
chefboy@socrates.berkeley.edu
Department of Linguistics
University of California
Berkeley, CA 94720
24th April 1997
My project is the development of a dictionary tool in the Perl programming language. In particular, I hope this tool will be of use to the students of Linguistics 240B, the second semester of the "Field Methods" requirement.
Our language of investigation is Lai-Chin, a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in the Chin hills of Burma. Throughout the academic year, I have been maintaining a database consisting, among other things, of Lai forms and their English glosses. My project is the creation of an interlinear-gloss-generating program which takes, as input, a Lai text (typed in the IPA-based orthography developed by the Field Methods students and our professor, James Matisoff), and produces, as output, the same text with interlinear English glosses.
A sub-task of this gloss-generator will be to include an "extra" piece of data for verbs: the 'form'. Lai verbs often participate in an interesting morphophonemic alternation, the nature of which is still somewhat mysterious. We have dubbed these alternations (for lack of better terms) Form 1 and Form 2. For verbs, the program will give not only the gloss, but also the form of the verb. If the verb is "invariant", i.e. doesn't participate in the alternation, the form returned will be "Inv".