Foolhardy hackers (such as yours truly) can customise the UBS Paratext 7.x interlinearizer by adjusting some files found in the program folder Paratext 7\Interlinear. Here’s a brief hacker’s guide:
Last year a fellow consultant asked the best way to use the store of glosses created by Paratext’s Interlinearizer feature. This is my answer: glossy. Not a real dictionary, but a helpful alternative view. Feedback welcome.
It never ceases to amuse and intrigue me how figurative language and idioms vary wildly and dangerously between languages. I say dangerously because the unwary can be very easily deceived by the ‘literal’ or ‘word for word’ meaning. Apparently in Mark 6, Herodias ‘kept/held John in her heart’. But in Nyankpa idiom we verified that …
There are some tasks that the WeSay Configuration Tool doesn’t let you configure directly. But you can write your own quite easily (as someone else has discovered) since the XML configuration file format has quite a lot of scope for extension using just Notepad or another text editor. Here we show how to do this …
Here’s a disclaimer: I first came to Nigeria in 2001 on a short term trip to help people finish off a dictionary as part of a Bible translation project. I thought that might be the last of my dictionary-making, but even though it’s not really my job now I reluctantly find myself drawn back to …
There is a fantastic program called WeSay for facilitating dictionary development. It’s particularly aimed at helping people gather and describe words in their own language even without strong computer experience or traditional linguistic training. It doesn’t replace analysis tools like FieldWorks, but presents a complementary approach and is interoperable. Where Fieldworks lets you document a …
Executive summary: ‘Literal’ is a darling word for many, attractive because it suggests straightforward, direct and reliable communication. However, the fact is that it gets used to mean quite a few different things by different people and if subjected to sufficiently intense scrutiny the assurances it offers are shown to be meaningless. While carrying emotive …
adj characterised by legs falling off. eg. “Daddy, I’m scelolytic. Pick me up.” From Greek σκελος part, leg + λυω to loose, unhitch. Variant Podilytic.
Here’s a great site about using WeSay to document languages and collect words for dictionaries from someone working in East Congo.
I’ve issued my first releases of keyboards for typing special Nigerian letters easily on a Mac. These facilitate producing the following special letters: əɛɨɔa̱e̱u̱i̱o̱ɓɗƙ₦, and hígh tóne, lòw tòne, fâllîng tône, and nãsãl fõrms.