A Study of South Asian Languages with Computer Assistance

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South and Southeast Asia are well known for their abundance of ethnic and linguistic groups. But since the independence of India and surrounding countries no linguistic survey has been made concerning the languages in these area. The objectives of this joint research project between ILCAA, Tokyo and CIIL, Mysore are as follows.1. To collect both spoken and written data of South Asian and Southeast Asian languages, comprising four major language groups in these areas, that is, Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Austroasiatic and Tibeto-Burman language groups.2. To construct a database of these language data in terms of computer facilities with a view to utilizing them for compiling textbooks, grammars and dictionaries in the future. To the attainment of these purposes, collaborations were made to compile a linguistic questionnaire for field work written in English, Hindi, Bengali and Japanese, and to provide data conversion computer programs for exchanging the non-roman character data between ILCAA … More and CIIL. Based on the common linguistic questionnaire, lexical and grammatical studies were made concerning the following languages; Hindi, Bengali, Panjabi, Oriya (affiliated to the Indo-Aryan languages), Kannada, Tamil, Telugu (Dravidian languages), Khasi, Santali, Mundari (Austroasiatic Languages), Mizo (Lushai), Meitei(Tibeto-Burman languages). Researches were made with the assistance of native speakers of the respective languages during 1988-90. Spoken language data were recorded with the International Phonetic Alphabet, which has been done for the first time of all these languages except Hindi, and were recorded for further experimental phonetic study and phonological analysis. Written data such as language textbooks, dictionaries of the above mentioned languages were selected and fed into computer in order to construct language database system on South Asian and Southeast Asian languages which is to be available for further language studies and is to be used by any researcher in this field. Less