Alaska Native Language Archive

Gary Holton
ANLC

E-MELD Workshop
August 2002
Alaska Native Language Center

E-MELD August
2002
Alaska Native Language Center
 Established in 1972 by state legislation
as a center for documentation and
cultivation of the state's 20 Native
languages
 Staff includes language teachers,
linguists, and language specialists
 Archiving is central to both the
documentation and pedagogical missions
E-MELD August
2002
Alaska Native Languages
 Eskimo-Aleut (5)
 Athabascan-Eyak-
Tlingit (13)
 Haida (1)
 Tsimshian (1)

E-MELD August
2002
Endangerment Status
 Numbers of speakers
 Central Yup'ik 10,000
 Inupiaq 3100
(+71,500 in Canada and Kalaallisut)
 Eyak 1
 Age of youngest speaker
 <2 (Siberian Yupik)
 >80 (Holikachuk, Deg Xinag, Haida, Eyak ... )
E-MELD August
2002
Documentation Status
 comprehensive published dictionaries for
4 of the 20 languages
 grammars for 3 languages
 dissertations on 5 other languages

E-MELD August
2002
Alaska Native Language Archive
 Primary linguistic data archive for the 20
Alaska Native languages
 Comprehensive -- nearly everything
written in or about Alaska Native langs
 Primary focus on unpublished manuscripts
and field notes
 Items include:
print (~10,000 items), audio (~4700 tapes),


digital
E-MELD data (??)
August
2002
Archive Mission
 preservation
 long-term storage and maintenance
 digital archiving of print and audio materials
 access
 controlled but straighforward access by
 community members
 educators

 linguists

E-MELD August
2002
Community-driven
 primary users of archive are members of
Native language communities
 communities also taking a lead in
preservation and access projects
 Eyak Language Digitization Project
 Unangan Tape Archive

E-MELD August
2002
Types of linguistic data
 field notes
 texts
 manuscripts
 pedagogical materials
 lexica
 comparative wordlists
 etymological wordlists
 placenames
E-MELD August
2002
Formats
 Historically a non-digital (paper and tape)
archive, but increasingly have to deal with
digital formats
 image files (pdf)
 raw text files
 word processor
 database (FoxPro, Access)
 audio (wav, aif)

E-MELD August
2002
Goals
 map archive metadata and expose via
OLAC-compliant data provider
 done
 digitize existing resources
 in progress
 create framework for archiving new digital
data
 go E-MELD!
E-MELD August
2002
Digital Lexical Data at ANLC
 unstructured text files (Eyak, Inupiaq)
 structured text files
 Lexware (Koyukon)
 Shoebox (Tanacross, Holikachuk)
 other "standard format" (Alutiiq)
 relational databases
 Access (Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit
Comparative Lexical Database)
E-MELD August
2002
Two Examples
 Koyukon Athabaskan Dictionary
 Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit Comparative
Lexical Database (AET-CLD)

E-MELD August
2002
Koyukon Athabascan Dictionary
 Eliza Jones & Jules Jetté,
ed. by James Kari
 stored as structure text file, formatted
using Bob Hsu's Lexware
 project began ca. 1979 (1898)
 printed dictionary published 2000
 electronic version in progress ...

E-MELD August
2002
Athabascan Morphology
 almost exclusively prefixing
 form of stem varies with TAM
 stem best represented by abstract lemma
or "root"
 lexeme consists of root plus one or more
(possibly discontinuous) prefixes

E-MELD August
2002
.rt ts'eyh$1
pa ch$w'-
tag wind blows Root
..th (P+pp#)de+0+ts'eyh
ex hedeets'eyh
eng it is windy
(blowing on the area) Subentry
...n bet'o deets'eye
...n mek'oodaats'eeye
..th P+pp#(#)de+\+ts'eyh Example
..th P+pp#(#)de+0+ts'eyh
..th P+e#k'e+de+\+ts'eyh
..th 0+ts'eyh Sub-subentry
...an menedaa\ts'eeye
..n,i e\ts'eeyh, -e\ts'eeye'
...n E\ts'eeyh Zo'@
...n k'ets'e e\ts'eeye
...n e\ts'eeyh yeege'
...n e\ts'eeyh doyeege'
....n e\ts'eebaaye
AET-CLD
 Jeff Leer, Giulia Oliverio, & Gary Holton
 project begun ca. 1997
 comparative data at level of:
 lexeme
 morpheme
 phoneme
 hierarchical
 interactive, dynamic database
E-MELD August
2002
AET-CLD Structure
Cogset

Lex

Morph

Phone
E-MELD August
2002
Database structure (portion)
Cogset table
Lex table
Morph table (1)
Morph table (2)

...to obtain a copy of the AET-CLD Access database,

please contact gary.holton@uaf.edu