The Unicode cookbook for linguists

Steven Moran

ISBN 10: 3961100918 / ISBN 13: 9783961100910

Published by Language Science Press, Language Science Press Jul 2018, 2018

About this Item

Neuware -This text is a practical guide for linguists, and programmers, who work with data in multilingual computational environments. We introduce the basic concepts needed to understand how writing systems and character encodings function, and how they work together at the intersection between the Unicode Standard and the International Phonetic Alphabet. Although these standards are often met with frustration by users, they nevertheless provide language researchers and programmers with a consistent computational architecture needed to process, publish and analyze lexical data from the world's languages. Thus we bring to light common, but not always transparent, pitfalls which researchers face when working with Unicode and IPA. Having identified and overcome these pitfalls involved in making writing systems and character encodings syntactically and semantically interoperable (to the extent that they can be), we created a suite of open-source Python and R tools to work with languages using orthography profiles that describe author- or document-specific orthographic conventions. In this cookbook we describe a formal specification of orthography profiles and provide recipes using open source tools to show how users can segment text, analyze it, identify errors, and to transform it into different written forms for comparative linguistics research.Books on Demand GmbH, Überseering 33, 22297 Hamburg 144 pp. Englisch.

Seller Inventory # 9783961100910

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Unicode cookbook for linguists
• Publisher: Language Science Press, Language Science Press Jul 2018
• Publication Date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 3961100918
• ISBN 13: 9783961100910
• Binding: Buch
• Condition: Neu
• Dimensions: 246W x 175H x 15D millimeters 246 millimeters width by 175 millimeters height by 15 millimeters depth
• Weight: 465 grams

About this title

Synopsis

This text is a practical guide for linguists, and programmers, who work with data in multilingual computational environments. We introduce the basic concepts needed to understand how writing systems and character encodings function, and how they work together at the intersection between the Unicode Standard and the International Phonetic Alphabet. Although these standards are often met with frustration by users, they nevertheless provide language researchers and programmers with a consistent computational architecture needed to process, publish and analyze lexical data from the world's languages. Thus we bring to light common, but not always transparent, pitfalls which researchers face when working with Unicode and IPA. Having identified and overcome these pitfalls involved in making writing systems and character encodings syntactically and semantically interoperable (to the extent that they can be), we created a suite of open-source Python and R tools to work with languages using orthography profiles that describe author- or document-specific orthographic conventions. In this cookbook we describe a formal specification of orthography profiles and provide recipes using open source tools to show how users can segment text, analyze it, identify errors, and to transform it into different written forms for comparative linguistics research.

About the Author

Steven Moran is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Comparative Linguistics, University of Zurich. He has a broad background in computational linguistics and works with data from under-resourced and endangered languages to answer research questions regarding worldwide linguistic diversity and language evolution. He focuses on phonology, language acquisition, and historical-comparative linguistics. He also does linguistic fieldwork in West Africa.