Molina and FC Vocabulary

mike gaby mikegaby at hotmail.com
Sat May 12 06:22:44 UTC 2001


Joe,
You may find there are more interested parties out there than you realize.
I too, look forward to the completion of this work.  You'll be sure to alert
the list when ready, for those who observe quietly.
Mike Gaby


>From: "r. joe campbell" <campbel at indiana.edu>
>Reply-To: nahuat-l at server2.umt.edu
>To: nahuat-l at server2.umt.edu
>Subject: Re: Molina and FC Vocabulary
>Date: Wed, 9 May 2001 11:55:38 -0500 (EST)
>
>Anthony,
>
> > Is there any possible idea when it will be ready?
>
>   I wish it were possible to make an accurate estimate.  On the Florentine
>side, the morphology is about 60.2% finished and the English glossing is
>about 59.85% finished.  The percentages refer to the number of word
>*tokens*, so this is rosier than it looks on the surface (considering the
>fact that 'in' occurs over 30,000 times in the residue [out of the
>original set of 247,000+ tokens]).  But the reason for a lot of words
>being in the current residue set is that they present some difficulties,
>so progress is uneven.
>
>    The remaining work on Molina will be faster, but it's still impossible
>to make an accurate time estimate.
>
> > Will all the entries have English translations?
>
>   On the Florentine, yes; on Molina, probably.  Actually, since I did the
>English translation of the Nahuatl-Spanish 1571 in the mid 1970's, the
>answer is *very* probably.
>
>
>
>
>
> > Will it be on paper or on a web page or on a CD-ROM or what?
>
>
>    Because of the size of the material and the relatively small size of
>the audience, I doubt that any publisher would see it as a feasible paper
>publication, CD-ROM seems like the most promising medium.
>
>
> > Will the Nahuatl spelling be standardized, e.g. marking vowel length and
> > glottal stops?
>
>    The Nahuatl spelling will be regularized (e.g., no variability in 'u'
>and 'o', no 'v' for 'u' [therefore 'o' also], spelling of /w/, etc.), but
>it is not likely that each word type will be spelled with vowel length and
>glottal stops.  However, that information will be supplied with the
>accompanying morphological information.  Obviously, it would have been
>impossible to supply the vowel length and glottal detail without the
>invaluable reference of Fran Karttunen's dictionary.
>
>
> >  > The vocabulary ... I extracted them from a database ...
> > Please who supplies that database?
>
>    I wish there had been a supplier for the database.  It has been
>constructed through a combination of work-study hours, my own key-punching
>(on Hollerith cards) and keying, that of my wife, professional
>key-punching hours in a university computing center, and optical scanning.
>The Nahuatl part of the Florentine, I owe to collaboration with a good
>friend who did well over half of the work (with super-human accuracy and
>energy).  As I mentioned before, it was started in 1970 (with the initial
>work on Molina, Nahuatl-Spanish, 1571) and other sections were added
>later.
>
>Best regards,
>
>Joe
>

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