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Last week I had a Eureka!* moment. I love these moments - when you've been trying to figure out a problem (could be big, could be small) and it is frustrating you to no end, and then finally you break through and find the solution! It's pretty amazing.
This Eureka! moment had to do with the linguistic examples I wrote about earlier. They weren't formatting properly, and because of this some of the examples were splitting across pages. Pretty early on in my attempts, I posted on a forum devoted to LyX/LaTeX/TeX, the typesetting program I use. Forums are pretty nifty ways to aggregate knowledge, and I've learned a ton about LaTeX through this particular forum. If you have a specialized industry or tool and you haven't found a forum where people can help each other out, find one quick or make one yourself. It is totally worth it. Unfortunately, with this particular issue no one was able to help. So I kept troubleshooting, trial and error. Eventually one of the things I tried worked! So satisfying. I imagine this is what I'll feel once I finally submit my PhD thesis... though people tell me a grammatical description is never complete, even if it's over 1,000 pages. *As I remember, and according to Wikipedia, "Eureka" comes from the Ancient Greek word εὕρηκα heúrēka, meaning "I have found (it)" and is attributed to Archimedes, who discovered how the volume of objects could be measured by water displacement.
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I realize that some of my posts haven't been as clear as they could be. Specifically, I talked a lot about interlinearized texts, but what does that actually mean? Well, the thing about language is that when you are talking about specific aspects of language, it's helpful if the reader actually knows what you're talking about. Thus, examples are useful. When you're discussing an unwritten language, this has to be taken to a whole new level. When I'm discussing examples in Pnar, I need four levels of representation, as in the example below. On the left the numbered lines represent the local orthography (line 1), the phonetic/phonemic representation using IPA (2), the word-for-word translation or English gloss (3), and the free translation that actually tells you the English meaning (4).
So on the left we have the four levels of representation, but you notice that the items on each line don't quite match up. This can be confusing, particularly if you're dealing with long examples. Interlinearization allows each element to correspond to one in the following line.
One way linguists do this is by creating tables, which have to be individually edited for each example. This is what you have to do in MSWord, unfortunately. Another way is using a typesetting program called LaTeX - this is how I produced the nicely formatted example on the right. Another convention is to have the local writing system be italicized and non-interlinearized. Notice that the glosses on the third line are not exactly a translation equivalent, sometimes they are grammatical abbreviations for function words. Here, 'ALL' is an abbreviation for 'allative', which is a traditional term for a marker on nouns that indicates the noun to be a 'goal' or what another noun is moving towards. Hopefully that clear things up a bit. To read more about interlinearized linguistic examples, this Wikipedia page should help. |
About meI'm a linguist and singer-songwriter. I write about life, travel, language and technology. Archives
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