Nxaʔamxcín (Moses) Dictionary Blog

-Please add a menu button for accessing the Verbs page.

-Please make the page title “Verb list” instead of “Word list”.

-Add an explanatory line below the title: This list includes the verb forms recorded in Dale Kinkade's Nxaʔamxcín materials.

-We don't want to combine the verb list with the Questions for Elders page. But we do need a way to mark which verb forms EB, SC, and PCS have already reviewed. SMK suggests the following:

If an entry contains psn:EB, psn:SC, or psn:PCS (i.e., they have commented on it, and we have recorded their input in the entry), flag it on the verbs page as reviewed – perhaps with an icon (a checkmark?) next to the editing status “traffic light”?

-We will eventually add a separate verb paradigms page.

-We've figured out a better way to identify verbs in the data, based on the transitive object and subject endings. Now we just need to finalize our list of those endings, and figure out how to work around endings like “-n” which could be one of many morphemes.

DONE

1)

Process date tags such as the following to show the @when attribute when the date tag has no text in it.

<bibl corresp="psn:PCS">PCS <date when="2013-02-06"></date></bibl>

2) Roles of contributors:

Please make the full description appear after each person's name on the Contributors page.

EB distinguishes "Elders" who have significant cultural knowledge, and "Fluent Speakers" who have language knowledge. So some of the contributors will be one or the other, and some could be both.

Added a new xml file to the svn repository. It's called new-data-2013.xml, and it's for new words PCS contributes, beyond her comments on words already in the data.

Now that I am working on the feature structures for the affix files using the new feature system I am noticing changes that are needed. I have documented them in comments at the top of the feature system file. (3) is implemented already

1. Need to add new daughter to name="affix", i.e. value="syntactic"
2. Need to add new fDecl name="syntactic" category, and list of symbol values that are daughter of "syntactic"; one of these latter is going to be "interrogative" (it is a type of enclitic particle with syntactic function).

3. Moved attributiveHabitual and repetitive to secondaryAspectual category.

Please note: The categories are determined on the basis of grammatical function and meaning. Therefore, for example, the outofControl morpheme is included with Control morphemes rather than with Reduplication on the basis of its function as a control marker rather than on the basis of its formal characteristics as a reduplicative morpheme. For the most part the categories reflect those provided in Nxa'amxcín grammar of Marie Louise Willett (2003), which in turn is based on all the work of Dale Kinkade.

SMK assigned me these tasks:

1) DONE Please sort the names with the following headings, using the tags in the pron:seg type="p"?

Personal Names (persName)

Place Names (placeName)

Tribes (orgName) 

People in Stories (name type="storyPeople")

Animals (name type="fauna")

Plants (name type="flora")

2) Printable PDF view of the names page for MM and SB to work from - Full view, with the entries expanded. MM needs to be able to see:

• phonemic transcription with its bibl
• phonetic transcriptions with their bibls
• hyph
• all defs and their bibls

She will also need a printable view of the Contributors page.

3) Get the orthography working. (Note: MM does not use the community orthography, but rather MDK's! ECH will ask GM what orthography SB uses.)

4) DONE One thing which arises from yesterday's feedback from SC is that we should hide glosses with type="i" from the Moses-English displays.

For example, in the verbs list we currrently see:

ʔacḥámˀsn I stopped him from getting in a fight, forbid, stop

"Forbid" and "stop" are inferred glosses that I added for the purpose of creating the English-Moses word list, but they're not direct translations of ʔacḥámˀsn. So of course SC and PC replied that "forbid" and "stop" should be removed. Can you please hide the inferred glosses from all the Moses-English pages?

The English-Moses word list is working correctly, in that ʔacḥámˀsn appears under the English headwords "forbid" and "stop", as well as the more specific "stopped".

Finally finished my bits of the paper relating to feature structures and interoperability. Now I can focus on the presentation...

MDH has posted a list of entries whose hyphs include verb morphology at:

http://pear.hcmc.uvic.ca:8081/moses/site/wordlist.htm?fromLang=moses&show=verbs

Here are the criteria we used to generate the list.

A verb entry's hyph will include one or more of:

m:n-CTL

m:t-TR

m:min

m:nun

m:nwˀaɬn

m:stu

m:tuɬ

m:ɬ-DIR

m:xit

m:cut

m:waxW

A verb entry's hyph will NOT include any of the nominalizing morphemes:

m:s

m:sxWs

m:ul

m:min-INST

I've also implemented "Get related words", which is more subtle than getting all the entries for a morpheme, and I've cleaned up some other iffy code and extended the schema a bit.

Had to resort to removing all the existing link elements following the first (main) stylesheet, then inserting a new link for the supplementary stylesheet. Also had to eschew the use ofd @title on link.

I have the cookies and session settings working OK, and abstracted to a little module, so that will be handy in future. I also have the widget controls on the page working, and retaining the correct settings. Now the problem is that I'm trying to turn stylesheets on and off using their "disabled" property, but it's really not working at all. Both Firefox and Chrome have problems, but they exhibit different behaviour. The spec says I can write to the disabled attribute, but it doesn't seem to work on Chrome if the stylesheet was disabled initially in the HTML code; with Firefox, the first disabled stylesheet seems to be active when the page first loads. Frustrating and annoying. I may have to resort to deleting and inserting link elements in the header, which is very crude, but might actually work.