Molina and FC Vocabulary

[r. joe campbell]

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