Nxaʔamxcín (Moses) Dictionary Blog

This morning we decided that a simple and quick way to distinguish between homographs with different meanings is required to make the English lookup part of the dictionary less confusing. This will be achieved by adding a clarificatory word or phrase in the @n attribute of a gloss. Glosses will then be presented in the E-to-M view with this clarification in parentheses. Processing on the website will need to be changed to take account of this, and the print dictionary rendering will also have to be written with this in mind.

The problem of duplicate @xml:id attributes on entries has now become a serious issue for the print dictionary building, because I'm unable to properly process the entire collection properly to produce the book; to build the dictionary I have to use XInclude to create a single XML source file, and when I do that there are over 1600 duplicate ids which prevent some of the processing steps from being successful.

I've taken a quick look at where the duplicates tend to be concentrated, by adding the files in alphabetical order and looking to see how many duplicates occur with each addition. These files create no problems (i.e. they have no duplicates among themselves):

affix_glot-ix.xml
affix_k-m.xml
affix_n-t.xml
affix_u-CAPS.xml
c.xml
c-glot.xml
c-rtr.xml
glottal.xml
h.xml
h-phar-part1.xml
h-phar-part2.xml
l-affric.xml
lex-suff.xml
new-data-2013.xml
p-glot.xml
phar-w.xml
qw-glot.xml
s-rtr.xml
t-glot.xml
xw.xml

When I add the remaining files, one by one (and only one at a time), these are the results:

k.xml            100 duplicates.
k-glot.xml:         18
kw.xml:              2
kw-glot.xml:          2
l.xml:              3
l-fric.xml:          6
m.xml:              3
n.xml:             97
p.xml:              7
particles.xml:          4
pron.xml:          2
q.xml:              4
q-glot.xml:          3
qw.xml:              1
rescued.xml:         54
s.xml:              2
t.xml:             20
ww-glot.xml:          4
x.xml:              3
x-uvul.xml:          4
yy-glot.xml:          4

What I'm going to do is develop the dictionary output using only the valid files, and then add the others in as they get fixed. In the meantime, it might be worth having a go at some of the low-hanging fruit (the ones with only two or three duplicates). More will show up as we add those in, of course -- there will be duplicates across the currently-excluded files as well as those that they share with the "good" files. So the dictionary PDFs will shrink in size, but I'll be able to start doing things like generating page-references that depend on xml:ids.

I've created a new MosesPhonemicCollation jar for sorting based on the phonemic representations. I've also forked the dictionary build process based on a parameter called "dictionaryType", which can be "learner" or "linguist". The former produces a dictionary based on the orthography, sorted with the MosesOrthographyCollation, and the latter produces one based on the phonemic transcriptions, with the new collation. The "alphabet" guides that run across the bottoms of pages are also appropriately different. I've abstracted the front matter into a separate file, and I'm auto-including the personography, although I'm not processing it yet.

The idea of having a single collation to sort everything in our db is now impractical, because the orthographical sorting rules clash with the transcriptional sorting rules, so I've created a new, simpler MosesOrthographyCollation class for sorting the orthography only. It's working well, but there are still some outstanding questions about it. In the meantime, we can't update the website because we don't have orthographies there yet, so this is only going to be used in for the print dictionary generation.

This has had to be redone a couple of times due to changes in the list of glyphs, but it's working now and tested with the print dictionary system.

We concluded that we need a different alphabetical order for the community dictionary vs. the linguists' dictionary.

The community dictionary should indeed follow the order in the 2006 language program dictionary - that is:

a aa ə əə č c cʼ h ḥ ḥʷ i ii k kʼ kʷ kʼʷ l lʼ ll llʼ ɬ ƛʼ m mʼ n nʼ p pʼ q qʼ qʷ qʼʷ r rʼ š s t tʼ u uu w wʼ x xʷ x̌ x̌ʷ y yʼ ʕ ʕʼ ʕʷ ʕʼʷ ʔ

The linguists' dictionary should follow the order in MDK's 1981 dictionary:

ʔ a ạ c c̣ cʼ ə ə̣ h ḥ ḥʷ i ị k kʼ kʷ kʼʷ l ḷ lˀ ḷˀ ɬ ƛʼ m mˀ n nˀ p pʼ q qʼ qʷ qʼʷ r rˀ s ṣ t tʼ u ụ w wˀ x xʷ x̣ x̣ʷ y yˀ ʕ ʕˀ ʕʷ ʕˀʷ

Today I got the following bits working:

• Running headers showing first and last items on dictionary pages.
• Front matter with independent numbering in roman numerals.
• Footers on dictionary pages showing alphabetical order (the order itself isn't yet finalized).
• Correct alignment and page-numbering for recto/verso pages (I'd screwed up on that).

Next is the implementation of the English-Moses glossary.

Proofing and rewriting. I've now finished section 4. The conclusion remains to be written, and the intro will have to be reworked at the end.

Worked through sections 1 and 2, and into 3, merging previous changes and suggesting more.

I now have some basic rendering for definitions and examples, so we're getting closer to something that looks like the final product will look. There are two chars missing from the fonts, but the author of the fonts may be able to add them for us (yay!). Other than that, things are looking good.

The author of the Aboriginal fonts kindly fixed the r-with-caron rendering problem we'd identified, within an hour of our reporting it, so it looks like that will be our font of choice. Tested and working now.