Nxaʔamxcín (Moses) Dictionary Blog

Met with AP, linguist and app developer, and shared ideas on dictionary interfaces, data-entry, and outputs.

Our PDF build is dependent on XEP, which is installed on my desktop, so up to now I've needed to be here to build it (since it was a scenario run from inside Oxygen). I've now converted this into an ant task which can be run remotely at the command line. Lesson learned at some cost of time: you can't use this:

  <arg value="-fo ${foFile}"/>

Instead, you have to use this:

  <arg line="-fo ${foFile}"/>

Otherwise XEP doesn't find the FO file, and assumes the fo is coming from stdin; it then complains that the root element is not fo:root.

Met with SK and ECH and discussed a number of remaining issues that might be amenable to algorithmic approaches; one was decided on (removing stress marks from phonemic segs in inferred roots), and I wrote and tested the required transformation, then ran it on the data at the end of the day.

Ran it on these files:

affix_aspectual, affix_glot-ix, affix_k-m, affix_n-t, affix_u-CAPs, lex-pref, lex-suf, particles,pron

and committed the results. SMK now checking.

Finished and tested the XSLT from yesterday; SMK will check results before we hard-run it and change the data.

Further to our discussions on numbers, I have added the following to feature_system.xml

1) wordType numberStem. So ECH will add this <fs> to the number stems 1-10.

<fs>
<f name="numberStem">
<binary value="true"/>
</f>
</fs>

2) countingType "ten"

I have also added the following <fs> to lexical suffix "akst-2", so ECH can use this morpheme for marking up the numbers 30, 40 ... 90.

<fs>
<f name="baseType">
<symbol value="affix"/>
</f>
<f name="positionType">
<symbol value="suffix"/>
</f>
<f name="affixType">
<symbol value="derivational"/>
</f>
<f name="derivationalType">
<symbol value="lexical"/>
<symbol value="counting"/>
</f>
<f name="countingType">
<symbol value="ten"/>
</f>
</fs>

MDH will then search for entries with this <fs> to build a test column for the table of numerical expressions. We can subsequently add more countingType values to the feature system, and to the entries for the appropriate lexical suffixes with classifier functions, and generate more columns for the table.

Discussions and decisions on how to handle numbers and counters: new wordType of cardinalNumeral, new lexicalSuffix type of numeralClassifier. These will be applied, and then harvesting will be done to generate a table of numerical expressions which will form the basis of decisions on how/whether to create a special section in the print dictionary.