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们将对J·P·哈灵顿数据库项目进行为期两年的语言研究。其目标是增加对J·P·哈林顿在20世纪上半叶收集的关于加州土著语言的语言和人种学笔记的获取。哈林顿采访的人往往是最后几个会说自己语言的人。因此，他的笔记代表了原本会丢失的知识。哈林顿的笔记估计有50万页，其中一半以上是关于加州语言的。研究人员将从转录这些基因开始。然后，他们将对语言学和人种学类别的材料进行编码，使其最大限度地对语言学家、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有用。转录和编码的笔记将通过网络上的数据库获得。可以通过语言(例如，几种加州原住民语言)、语义域(亲属术语、地名、植物等)以及其他文化和语言类别来搜索这些笔记。该数据库还将生成哈灵顿笔记的连续文本以及带有哈林顿英语和西班牙语注释的每种语言的词典。世界上每一种语言都代表着一种独特的解决方案，解决了人类认知的表达以及人类对社会和物理环境进行分类和互动的各种方式。哈林顿记录的大多数加州原住民语言已经不再使用，或者现在只有几个说老年语言的人。因此，哈林顿的材料受到从事语言和文化复兴的美洲原住民社区的珍视，对来自不同学科的学者来说很有价值。J·P·哈灵顿数据库项目将增加美国原住民社区以及语言学家和其他学者获取这些材料的机会。

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.