Transcriptions of linguistic data on the Yongning Na language (nɑ˩-ʐwɤ˥, also known as Narua or Mosuo), some scripts, and a Na-Chinese-English-French dictionary. The audio is available from the Pangloss Collection.
New to 2018-2019: materials related to the automatic transcription tool Persephone are placed in a specific folder.
New to 2024: the project is having a forward sprint, preparing for version 2.0 of the Na (=Narua, Moso, Mosuo) - English - Chinese - French dictionary (Alawua dialect).
Contributions are indicated in the documents' metadata, and as notes inside the XML files.
- The main language consultant is Mrs. Latami Dashilamu 拉他咪打史拉姆 (lɑ˧thɑ˧mi˥ ʈæ˧ʂɯ˧-lɑ˩mv̩˩; previously rendered in Chinese as 拉他咪·达石拉么，拉它米旦史拉么，拉它米打史拉么 and such, romanized as Latami Dashilame and such).
- Roselle Dobbs designed an orthography for Na (Narua); all orthographic transcriptions in the XML documents and in the dictionary are hers. She also produced English translations of several texts.
The impetus for moving into GitHub came from computer science colleagues: Séverine Guillaume, Céline Buret, Benjamin Galliot, ... at CNRS.
A motivation for having the Na data in a public repository was to allow full reproducibility of work done by Oliver Adams creating an automatic phonemic transcription tool for Yongning Na. The tool is available here and a description is available as: Evaluating Phonemic Transcription of Low-Resource Tonal Languages for Language Documentation.
@inproceedings{adams18evaluating,
title = {Evaluating phonemic transcription of low-resource tonal languages for language documentation},
author = {Adams, Oliver and Cohn, Trevor and Neubig, Graham and Cruz, Hilaria and Bird, Steven and Michaud, Alexis},
booktitle = {Proceedings of LREC 2018},
year = {2018}
}