[Lexicog] Tone languages in Toolbox/Shoebox

[sophie_in_africa]

Dear fellow linguists,

we're two PhD students working on African tonal languages for our
projects and during our preparations for our fieldstay we've
encountered a few software problems. We hope some of you might be able
to help us with this.

We intend to use Toolbox (the follow-up tool to Shoebox) as a software
program for lexicon building and for interlinear morphemic glossing.
The problem is that we have not yet found ways to tackle tone in the
program. In particular we have the following problems

1. Ways of associating a lexical tone with its tone-bearing unit
2. How to make Toolbox disambiguate between for example an "a" with
high tone, an "a" with a mid and an "a" with a low tone. So far we can
make it "look" right by adding diacritics as secondary characters but
this does not help for searching, glossing, ... since Toolbox seems to
ignore secondary characters in for example searching.
3. How to search a database not just for segmental sounds, e.g. all
"a", but specifically for "á" etc.
4. How to deal with grammatical tone, in particular the following
5. How to enter segmentless tonal morphemes such as tonal melodies for
tenses of verbs
6. How to mark up a downstep that has grammatical function
7. How to include grammatical rules for phonological processes
8. How to formulate phonological and prosodic rules where tones and
segments behave differently, for example floating tones like in a
tense marker "á" where the segment "a" is deleted but the high tone
stays behind and affects the tone of the following words

Has anybody encountered similar difficulties? How did you solve the
problems? What advice can you give us? Do you know alternatives to
Toolbox that are more suitable for tonal languages?

We'll happily provide a summary of the replies and post it here.

Thanks for your support,

Sophie Salffner and Stuart McGill
School of Oriental and African Studies






 
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