Five Languages of Eurasia: Field Work, Analysis and Digital Archiving

该项目由美国国家科学基金会濒危语言记录项目和北极社会科学项目资助，由科尔盖特大学的亚历山大·纳希莫夫斯基博士领导，莫斯科大学亚历山大·基布里克博士领导的一组俄罗斯语言学家将开展一个为期三年的项目，重点关注两个领域：(1)对五种语言进行实地考察：高加索地区的阿尔奇语和希纳卢语，泰米尔半岛的恩加那山语和埃涅茨语，堪察加半岛的阿卢托语；(2)开发用于创建语言档案的工具和基础设施。第一个领域的工作将由俄罗斯学者完成，他们是相关语言的顶级专家，但缺乏根据“最佳实践”创建语言档案的技术和专业知识。第二个领域的工作将由PI完成，他是语言学博士，从1985年开始教授计算机科学，教授并广泛发表了这些“最佳实践”所基于的XML和语义Web技术。项目参与者将：-进行广泛的实地工作，以所有语言记录数字音频和视频材料；-根据最佳做法修订、数字化和存档，并提供更广泛的访问以前收集的材料，可追溯到20世纪70年代；-设计两种语文的文字系统，以及其中一种语文的教材；-针对三种语言，建立一个包含不同层次声音样本的语音数据库，从音节到单词到句子再到叙述，并配有视频显示发音；-根据数字语言档案的最佳实践格式化主要材料，并使其作为动态OLAC存储库，以一致的、可存档的、可互操作的和基于web的格式提供；-进一步发展基础设施和软件工具，以实现创建语言档案的“最佳实践”，包括PI独特的数字视频注释软件工具。本提案将利用顶尖学者的专业知识和正在进行的研究，他们将在本提案的范围之外，为数据的修饰和描述做出大量的劳动和专业知识密集型工作。他们将致力于记录濒临灭绝或濒临灭绝的语言，在极端偏远或政治动荡的地区，在他们已经拥有了解和信任他们的线人网络的社区。此外，该提案还将生产用于进行实地考察和将结果存档在网络上的软件工具。其中一些将成为从领域专家那里收集元数据的通用工具。该提案完成后，将使几个社区受益。首先，参与该项目的一些以英语为母语的社区将获得一套书写系统和儿童教材。第二，俄罗斯语言学家社区将得到强有力的推动，采取更好的档案做法，他们中的许多人受过高度训练，积极主动，多年来一直致力于俄罗斯联邦许多濒危语言的研究。现在存在的这些关于他们工作的文件大多是在纸上或专有格式，用俄语写的，录音带丢失或质量很差。如果他们的文献标准得到改善，世界各地的语言学家和人类学家将获得大量妥善存档的语言知识。第三，世界各地的语言学家社区，不仅仅是那些研究濒危语言的人，将获得强大的新工具，其中一些工具被捆绑在SIL流行的工具箱中用于实地工作。最后，该项目将使正在构建语义网的计算机科学家和技术人员受益：语义网是一个由记录良好、索引良好的信息组成的网络，可以支持复杂的搜索、导航和推理。

This project, which is funded through the NSF Documenting Endangered Languages program and the Arctic Social Sciences program, led by Dr. Alexander Nakhimovsky of Colgate Univiersity and a group of Russian linguists led by Dr. Alexander Kibrik of Moscow University will conduct a three-year project that will focuse on two areas: (1) field work on five languages: Archi and Khinalugh in the Caucasus, Nganasan and Enets on the Taimyr peninsula, Alutor on Kamchatka; and (2) development of tools and infrastructure for creating language archives. Work in the first area will be done by Russian scholars who are top experts on the languages involved but lack technology and expertise to create language archives in accordance with "best practices." Work in the second area will be done by the PI, a PhD in linguistics who has been teaching computer science since 1985 and has taught and extensively published on XML and Semantic Web technologies on which these "best practices" are based. Participants of the project will: - conduct extensive fieldwork to record digital audio and video materials in all languages; - revise, digitize, and document in accordance with best practices, as well as provide wider access to previously collected materials, going back to the 1970s; - devise a writing system for two languages, and educational materials for one of them; - for three languages, create a phonetic database containing sound samples at different levels, from syllable to word to sentence to narrative, with videos showing articulation; - format primary materials in accordance with best practices for digital language archives and make them available, as dynamic OLAC repositories, in consistent, archivable, interoperable, and Web-based formats; - further develop the infrastructure and software tools for "best practices" in creating language archives, including PI's unique software tool for annotating digital video. This proposal will leverage the expertise and ongoing research of top-notch scholars who will contribute, beyond the boundaries of this proposal, a great deal of labor- and expertise-intensive work on glossing and describing the data. They will work to document languages that are either endangered or on the brink of extinction, in areas that are either extremely remote or in political turmoil, in communities where they already have networks of informants who know and trust them. In addition, the proposal will produce software tools both for conducting fieldwork and for archiving its results on the Web. Some of them will be quite general tools for collecting metadata from domain experts. When completed, the proposal will benefit several communities. First, some of the communities of native speakers involved in the project will receive a writing system and educational materials for children. Second, the community of Russian linguists, many of them highly trained and motivated people who have been working on the many endangered languages of the Russian federation for years and decades, will receive a powerful impetus to adopt better archival practices. Such documentation of their work that exists now is mostly on paper or in proprietary formats, in Russian, with audiotapes missing or of poor quality. If their documentation standards improve, linguists and anthropologists worldwide will get access to vast linguistic knowledge properly archived. Third, the community of linguists everywhere, not only those working on endangered languages, will receive powerful new tools, some of them bundled into SIL's popular toolbox for fieldwork. Finally, the project will benefit computer scientists and technologists who are building the Semantic Web: a web of well-documented and well-indexed information that can support complex search, navigation and inference.