1 / 61

Digitalized Dialect Studies: North-Western Romanian

Digitalized Dialect Studies: North-Western Romanian. Sheila M. Embleton, Dorin Uritescu & Eric S. Wheeler York University, Toronto, Canada. Context. Noul Atlas lingvistic român. Crisana. Crisana region in north-west Romania Hard copy atlas by Stan and Uritescu (1996, 2003)

vaughn
Download Presentation

Digitalized Dialect Studies: North-Western Romanian

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript


  1. Digitalized Dialect Studies: North-Western Romanian Sheila M. Embleton, Dorin Uritescu & Eric S. Wheeler York University, Toronto, Canada

  2. Context

  3. Noul Atlas lingvistic român. Crisana • Crisana region in north-west Romania • Hard copy atlas by Stan and Uritescu (1996, 2003) • Digitize to make it more accessible

  4. RODA: Romanian Online Dialect Atlas Digitize and present hard copy atlas: • Mostly graduate students • in Canada and Romania • Enter data from maps into text files • When complete, it will be posted to the Internet for general use

  5. Objective • Use Information Technology to permit a broad range of scholars to • access the data, • select the data appropriately, and • present the data clearly; and so gain greater understanding of its significance.

  6. Other Digital Atlases

  7. Other Digital Atlases • Salzburg • H.Goebl • phonetic dialect atlas of Dolomitic Ladinian (since 1985) • Edgar Haimerl • ‘Visual DialectoMetry’ (VDM) (ca 2000) • Netherlands • Heeringa et al.; de Vriend et al. • Dialectometric and cartographic software

  8. Other Dialect Atlases • Japan • D. Long, others (http://nihongo.human.metro-u.ac.jp/~long/maps/perceptmaps.htm ) • Japanese area maps

  9. Related endeavours • Google Earth • Available mapping software • Images world-wide • Dialect studies with databases • e.g. Iran: National survey for 2009 • Visualization software • e.g T. Pi. Atlas of Dialect Topography • http://dialect.topography.chass.utoronto.ca/dt_atlas.php

  10. Overall challenges: • Digitize data • Accessible interface to data • Search • Analyze • Presentation of data • As data • As maps

  11. RODA as linguistic technology

  12. The technology allows one to: • View the data • Search for data and count it • Interpret the data or the counts • Analyze the data (e.g. MDS) • See the results as maps • Save the maps as .jpg pictures • Save the results for later use • Hear samples of the data

  13. RODA: function • Custom-defined maps • You select the data • You see the result as a map • Programmable access to the whole set of digitized data • You ask about data spread over many maps • You can customize what you search for (not just the editor’s choice)

  14. RODA: selection of data • Context of search becomes important • Word-final vs non-final vs either • Plain character vs accented character • Character vs (superposed) alternate • Choice of fields to search • E.g. With nouns: sg. vs pl. entries • Variations heard by field workers • Flags to mark special situations (e.g. hesitation)

  15. Examples from RODA

  16. Crisana, Romania

  17. Crisana, Romania (from RODA)

  18. Seeing Words Change Word-final /u/in Latin and non-Latin words

  19. Word-final /u/ from Latin

  20. Is word-final /u/ random? • Look for a geographic pattern over all potential occurrences • The maps for single examples such as /ochi/ and others, are in the hard-copy dialect Atlas, • But total data for all examples is spread widely over many maps.

  21. Word-final /u/ • Data from: • 407 maps • Field 1 • Size of cross shows the number of occurrences • Horizontal= syllabic • Vertical = non-syllabic

  22. Word-final, syllabic /u/ • Data from: • 407 maps • Field 1 • word-final only • (horizontal = vertical) • Locations 137, 141, 146 show most examples

  23. Word-final, syllabic /u/ • Can review the data

  24. Word-final, syllabic /u/ • Data from: • selected maps • Field 1 • word-final only • removed non-vocalic /u/ , def. art., some clusters +/u/. • (horizontal = vertical) • Locations 137, 141, 146 show most examples

  25. /u/ Pattern • There is a pattern: • Word final /u/ is retained in central, and north-eastern areas • It is syllabic mostly in parts of the central area • The locations with most frequent syllabic final /u/ do not form a continuous area

  26. Raised word-final /e/

  27. Raised, word-final /e/ • Data from: • 407 maps • Field 1 • Horizontal= vertical • Raised /e/ is wide-spread

  28. Raised, word-final /e/ vs schwa • Data from: • 407 maps • Field 1 • Raised /e/ (horizontal) • Raised schwa (vertical) • Raised schwa is also wide-spread but does not always coincide with raised /e/ • (cf. 158, 159)

  29. High /e/ and schwa

  30. High /e/ and schwa

  31. Retained /u/ versus Raised /e/ • Syllabic word-final /u/ (horizontal) • Raised word-final /e/ (vertical) • Zoom-in view of central area • 137, 141, 146 have both

  32. Retained /u/ versus Raised schwa • Syllabic word-final /u/ (horizontal) • Raised word-final schwa (vertical) • Zoom-in view of central area • 137, 146 (not 141) have both

  33. Conclusion • The raising of final mid vowels and the weakening of final high vowels are distinct natural lenition processes.

  34. Non-palatalized dentals before front vowels

  35. Non-palatalized dentals before front vowels • Crişana: dentals before front vowels are palatalized. • Are they restructured as palatals? • If the process is no longer productive, there may be non-palatalized dentals before front vowels. • If so, where, in what forms and what is the frequency?

  36. Non-palatalized dentals before front vowels • Examples everywhere. • (As is well-known, dentals are not palatalized in Oaş, except for 220.) • Map shows where and how many examples.

  37. /st/ before front vowels

  38. /t/ but not /st/ before /e/ and /i/ • 407 maps, field 1 • /te/ (horizontal) • /ti/ (vertical) • values all scaled x 3 to make more visible

  39. /t/ but not /st/ before /e/ and /i/ • Shown as an interpretive map • 407 maps, field 1 • /te/ (red) • /ti/ (black) • Map is automatically drawn from the previous searches

  40. /t/ before /e/ or /i/ • See the examples that were found and counted. • See the source map number and location number of each. • Can delete “exceptions” from the count.

  41. Non-palatalized dentals before front vowels • There are examples everywhere (not only in Oaş) • Here we establish a result with the location and frequency of examples. • Can view the examples that support the conclusion.

  42. /e, i/ after /ts, z, s/ • With digital data and tools, we easily discover significant patterns • Here, we see the conservation of front vowels after velarizing consonants. • We see • frequency and areas • phonological context

  43. /e, i/ after /ts, z, s/

  44. MDS

  45. MDS process • Multidimensional Scaling (MDS) uses the “linguistic distance” between N+1 locations to place them in an N-dimensional space. • Then, the N-space is projected onto a 2-space (a map) such that the distances among the points are preserved as best as possible.

  46. MDS and dialects • Embleton and Wheeler have used an MDS process on • English dialects • Finnish dialects • Dialect roughly correlates with geography

  47. Dialect groupings • Began with a hypothesis about dialect groupings in Crisana • Analyzed all data in 407 maps using the MDS method • Identity is exact match; any difference is a difference of 1. • Distance is sum of differences. • We see the groupings on a map.

  48. MDS mapAll groups • South-east and South-west are distinct. • The rest are less so. • Suggests the dialect unity of the region • --> refine groupings

  49. MDS mapRefined groupings • Still, considerable overlap or closeness • More groups that could be identified, e.g.: • Several divisions in West • Two areas in Oaş • Oaş is close to southern areas • Still, its distinctness is clear (cf. also Uritescu 1984a).

More Related