The J. P. Harrington Database Project: The California Materials

在国家科学基金会的支持下，玛莎·马克里博士和她的同事将对JP哈灵顿数据库项目进行为期两年的语言学研究。其目标是增加获得J. P.哈灵顿在二十世纪上半叶收集的关于加州土著语言的语言学和人种学笔记的机会。哈灵顿采访的人往往是最后剩下的说他们语言的人。因此，他的笔记代表了否则就会丢失的知识。哈灵顿的笔记估计有50万页，其中一半以上是关于加州语言的。研究人员将开始转录这些。然后，他们将编码语言和人种学类别的材料，最大限度地提高其对语言学家，生物学家，地理学家，历史学家，人类学家，考古学家以及美洲原住民社区的有用性。将通过网上数据库提供这些记录和编码说明。可以按语言搜索这些笔记（例如，几种本地加州语言），语义域（亲属术语，地名，植物群等），以及其他文化和语言类别。该数据库还将生成哈灵顿笔记的运行文本，以及每种语言的词汇与哈灵顿的英语和西班牙语的注释。世界上每一种语言都代表着人类认知表达的独特解决方案，以及人类分类和与社会和物理环境互动的各种方式。哈灵顿记录的大部分加州土著语言都不再有人说了，或者现在只有几个上了年纪的人说。因此，哈灵顿的材料受到从事语言和文化振兴的美洲土著社区的珍视，对来自各种学科的学者也很有价值。J.P.哈灵顿数据库项目将增加美国土著社区以及语言学家和其他学者对这些材料的访问。

With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Martha Macri and her colleagues will conduct two years of linguistic research on the J. P. Harrington Database Project. The goal is to increase access to the linguistic and ethnographic notes on Native California languages collected by J. P. Harrington during the first half of the twentieth century. The people Harrington interviewed were often among the last remaining speakers of their languages. His notes thus represent knowledge that would otherwise be lost. Over half of an estimated 500,000 pages of Harrington's notes are on California languages. Researchers will begin by transcribing these. They will then code the materials for linguistic and ethnographic categories that maximize their usefulness to linguists, biologists, geographers, historians, anthropologists, archaeologists, and also to Native American communities. The transcribed and coded notes will be available through a database on the web. It will be possible to search these notes by language (e.g., several Native California languages), semantic domain (kin terms, toponyms, flora, etc.), and other cultural and linguistic categories. The database will also generate a running text of Harrington's notes as well as lexicons for each language with Harrington's English and Spanish glosses.Each of the world's languages represents a unique solution to the expression of human cognition and to the variety of ways in which humans categorize and interact with their social and physical environment. Most of the Native California languages that Harrington recorded are no longer spoken, or now have only a few elderly speakers. Harrington's materials are thus cherished by Native American communities engaged in language and cultural revitalization and valuable to scholars from a wide variety of disciplines. The J. P. Harrington Database Project will increase access for Native American communities as well as linguists and other scholars to these materials.