The Index Diachronica

[Man in Space]

Wait— I thought the ID was the Correspondence Library… where do the sound changes in tge former come from, then?

It is (or at least that was the core around which it was based); I worded this poorly. I was asking about how much of the write-ups and work done by the OG thread posters was viable. How much we could consider it “complete” for lack of a better term. I speak of the contributors to the thread proper, not any surprise additions of mine throughout the years.

[bradrn]

(Just remembered I’ve been meaning to reply to this but kept on forgetting… sorry!)

and Pyysalo's "System PIE" web app, built around the idea that the sound changes from Pyysalo-Indo-European to the various languages were complete enough that the program could compute the regular form and highlight irregularities.

I’m even less familiar with this one, though I confess that similar ideas have occured to me. How well does it work, though?

I haven't spent much time with the web app, but it seems almost decent - the main technical problem is that there's no real search, but this is typical for academic projects. (see also: PHOIBLE)

Now that is actually a really nicely-designed website. (A similarly well-designed website which comes to mind is Blust and Trussel’s ACD, though that of course has a somewhat more modest research agenda.) But I’m not quite sure why you say there’s no search — I can see a search bar right at the bottom:



Meanwhile, Pyysalo’s research itself actually looks very interesting: I’m not quite sure why he doesn’t use the standard reconstruction, but I see no reason that shouldn’t work with his methods. Though we mustn’t count our chickens before they hatch, if we can get this new ID reliable enough it may be possible to do the same thing with our data — I’ve been testing the idea with those Old English sound changes on the other thread, and they seem to work pretty well for the purpose. (And of course zompist made up those Latin→Portuguese changes for SCA², which work pretty well too.)

Incidentally, I think this makes for the only time I’ve ever seen a sound change applier used for ‘serious’ linguistic research: namely Foma. I note with interest that it uses a finite-state transducer approach, something I’ve been wanting to figure out for a long time but have never quite managed to understand. Famously rsca also uses FSTs, which is why it can reverse changes so easily — I’ve tried reading its source code, but it’s too convoluted for me to make head or tail of its algorithm for converting sound changes to FST form. At first glance it looks like Foma makes you input the FSTs directly, which makes sense computationally but would be rather painful for users.

(As for PHOIBLE, I quite like pshrimp for searching, despite its weird postfix search syntax. I’m fond of Forth, but it’s a little painful for search…)

Which can't even be mechanically converted to the standard model, because it's saying the /e/ comes from *oi > *ai > e rather than *ō > *ø > (v)e. (I'm not even sure if Pyysalo recognizes this rule - the only example I can think of where v- is preserved is vesh 'ear', which I can't find. I'd search the 'show all' page - you can only search on the page you're looking at, which is truly bizarre - but my computer doesn't have enough free memory to render the page.

Mine can render it; if you tell me what to search I can check this for you. (Not sure whether I should look at ‘ve’, or ‘ō’, or ‘u̯e’, or in the PIE field or the descendant field…?)

(To be fair, good search is a difficult technical and design problem... but adequate search would be doable with a decent working knowledge of SQL. Which every web developer ought to know. Especially the academic ones - I've seen people do things with pandas that should be illegal.)

Never mind its usage, pandas should be illegal to start with!

[SquiDark]

Hi all,
I don't think I have ever made a post here, so I would like to introduce myself.
You may have known me for the Sorted Index Diachronica and Errata on reddit, and I heard from Man in Space that Index Diachronica is getting a new and improved edition, and I would like to contribute with my experience with v10.2
I can contribute to the Sinitic languages since I can read Chinese.
I can also provide reviews for entries, since I made the errata and all. Though I am not sure how much value would my review be, since I never majored in linguistics.
That being said, I don't think I would engage with ID as intensively as before (the sorted ID and errata was literally 22 months of my life), since real life takes priorities and all.

[SquiDark]

and Pyysalo's "System PIE" web app, built around the idea that the sound changes from Pyysalo-Indo-European to the various languages were complete enough that the program could compute the regular form and highlight irregularities. Building a searchable dictionary of every language is probably out of scope, but maybe we could import extant databases somehow? (ABVD, the online Proto-Siouan dictionary, etc... unfortunately for Indo-European there isn't a better resource than Wiktionary)

What is this System PIE web app you were talking about?

[bradrn]

A belated welcome to the board SquiDark! Glad to have you on the team.

I can also provide reviews for entries, since I made the errata and all. Though I am not sure how much value would my review be, since I never majored in linguistics.

Neither have most of us; you’re far from alone.

That being said, I don't think I would engage with ID as intensively as before (the sorted ID and errata was literally 22 months of my life), since real life takes priorities and all.

That’s absolutely fine. Given how comprehensive your version ended up being (22 months is a long time!), I think the only things left would be some sources so we can triple-check things and slot the changes into the right spots in each language.

and Pyysalo's "System PIE" web app, built around the idea that the sound changes from Pyysalo-Indo-European to the various languages were complete enough that the program could compute the regular form and highlight irregularities. Building a searchable dictionary of every language is probably out of scope, but maybe we could import extant databases somehow? (ABVD, the online Proto-Siouan dictionary, etc... unfortunately for Indo-European there isn't a better resource than Wiktionary)

What is this System PIE web app you were talking about?

This one: http://pielexicon.hum.helsinki.fi/

[Nortaneous]

But I’m not quite sure why you say there’s no search — I can see a search bar right at the bottom:

I think it only applies to the current view, which is odd. (Although in general being able to search within an already-selected view - presumably the result of a past search - is a nice theoretically possible search feature that I don't think anything has.)

Mine can render it; if you tell me what to search I can check this for you. (Not sure whether I should look at ‘ve’, or ‘ō’, or ‘u̯e’, or in the PIE field or the descendant field…?)

Alb. vesh should be sufficient, although I see that Orel has PAlb. *wausi- or *wōusa with the comment that "prothetic v- is not quite regular".

[Man in Space]

I had the opportunity to get the thoughts of Colin Gorrie after much belatedly seeing a tweet in which he mentions the Index. He mentioned UPSID in a context of combining features of it with the Index, basically. I asked him further and he had this to say:

The idea behind mentioning UPSID in that tweet was that it would place the sound changes in the context of the overall phonological systems of the language, before and after the change. Are the sound changes creating new contrasts? Are they merging old contrasts?

[. . .]

This is especially important for changes in vowel quality, which (a) often participate in chain shift phenomena, and (b) are notoriously hard to notate unambiguously. E.g. in an /a i u/ system, /u/ may in fact be [o] allophonically. If that allophony is later phonologized by the loss of the conditioning environment, it would look like a change u => o , but that would be deceptive in a way, since the quality of that vowel was always [o].

[bradrn]

I had the opportunity to get the thoughts of Colin Gorrie after much belatedly seeing a tweet in which he mentions the Index. He mentioned UPSID in a context of combining features of it with the Index, basically. I asked him further and he had this to say:

The idea behind mentioning UPSID in that tweet was that it would place the sound changes in the context of the overall phonological systems of the language, before and after the change. Are the sound changes creating new contrasts? Are they merging old contrasts?

[. . .]

This is especially important for changes in vowel quality, which (a) often participate in chain shift phenomena, and (b) are notoriously hard to notate unambiguously. E.g. in an /a i u/ system, /u/ may in fact be [o] allophonically. If that allophony is later phonologized by the loss of the conditioning environment, it would look like a change u => o , but that would be deceptive in a way, since the quality of that vowel was always [o].

This is a very interesting idea. It should be easily possible to do this in an automated way by querying PHOIBLE/UPSID/whichever database you prefer.

(Also, I’ve never heard of Colin Gorrie before; who is he?)

[Man in Space]

(Also, I’ve never heard of Colin Gorrie before; who is he?)

This is he.

[SquiDark]

Does anyone know how to contact Tropylium? I want to ask them what the capital I in the Finnic sound changes means but their last activity here was 2 years ago.

[bradrn]

Does anyone know how to contact Tropylium? I want to ask them what the capital I in the Finnic sound changes means but their last activity here was 2 years ago.

If you send them a PM they might respond.

[SquiDark]

Are the transcriptions in ID by default /phonemic/ or [phonetic]? It seems like mix of both and it's confusing when a line of sound change is taken out of context, i.e., the Searchable ID.

[Man in Space]

Are the transcriptions in ID by default /phonemic/ or [phonetic]? It seems like mix of both and it's confusing when a line of sound change is taken out of context, i.e., the Searchable ID.

I tried for the latter when I could, but it wasn’t always possible.

[SquiDark]

Are the transcriptions in ID by default /phonemic/ or [phonetic]? It seems like mix of both and it's confusing when a line of sound change is taken out of context, i.e., the Searchable ID.

I tried for the latter when I could, but it wasn’t always possible.

Yeah, I figure it's fundamentally impossible to do a pure phonetic transcription for reconstructed (proto-)languages.
Still, I think we should decide the "default mode" for ID. I would like the phonetic transcription to be default since I agree with dhok:

Also, it's always worth remembering that sound changes (at least initially) apply to phones and not phonemes, and to the extent a change acts on a feature it may only cover certain allophones of a phoneme. Since we usually want to write sound changes phonemically, we usually solve this by adding an environment, but the change itself may be effectively unconditional.

And we might already have a solution at hand to deal with reconstructed phonemes:

I agree this is something we need to consider. (The example that came to mind for me was Proto-Austronesian, with its /*R *D *T *C *N *S/.) But I really like your suggestion of having each page specify its own transcription: it seems like a very sensible compromise to me.

We could add disclaimers in each section like "The phoneme *C is transcribed as [t͡s] based on the reconstruction by Blust (2009)"

[bradrn]

Actually, that reminds me — I’ve been meaning to make a mockup of the web interface for the Middle English sound changes, those being the only ones which are anything like complete at the moment. It’s escaped my attention due to my being utterly swamped with other work at the moment, but hopefully I’ll get around to it sometime in the next month or two.

…and, as promised, here’s the mockup: http://bradrn.com/files/english-mockup.html. Hopefully this should give some idea of the direction I want to go with this project: a nice website with sound changes which are (a) detailed and (b) reliable, at least to the extent that available data allow. And when the data don’t allow that, it should be explicitly indicated as opposed to ignored, which is what the current ID does and everyone agrees is unsatisfactory.

[Man in Space]

That is a beautiful mock-up, though I’d like to hear more about the star-rating criteria.

[bradrn]

That is a beautiful mock-up, though I’d like to hear more about the star-rating criteria.

Glad you like it! I suggested the following system earlier:

1. Fully documented sound changes from the ancestor to the descendent, with conditioning, ordering etc. fully worked out and agreed on
2. Less well documented sound changes, mostly worked out but perhaps with minor inconsistencies or unknown points
3. Mostly unordered sound correspondences, possibly with some details on conditioning but not much more
4. Basic phoneme correspondences with no further details
5. Obviously insufficient changes including only a subset of phoneme correspondences

…though of course that was only some first thoughts. The stars on the mockup also have a tooltip if you hover the mouse over them: ‘Only minor uncertainties present in ordering and transcription; some sound changes may be missing’.

[Man in Space]

Glad you like it! I suggested the following system earlier:

So you did. That's…embarrassing for me. Regardless, I like the template, and maybe this weekend I'll finally sit down and move some of those Lakes Plain data into ID form.

[bradrn]

Glad you like it! I suggested the following system earlier:

So you did. That's…embarrassing for me.

Not really… I never mentioned stars there, and even I took a while to find that post!

Regardless, I like the template, and maybe this weekend I'll finally sit down and move some of those Lakes Plain data into ID form.

That would be great! Could you post it in the Lakes Plain thread when you’re done? (Or even while you’re working on it… nothing wrong with scratchpads after all!)

[Man in Space]

Sure. I'll have to compare notes with Darren to see what he says too.