The Index Diachronica

[Darren]

Today the ID came up in the course of a discussion I had with Alexandre François

• Examples — it would be nice to have examples for each sound changes. This shouldn’t be too hard for any halfway reliable source, although it would make for more work. Given the hyperlinked nature of the new ID, he suggested that example words could e.g. be linked to the corresponding Wiktionary entry when present. (I think it shouldn’t be very hard to retrofit this into the existing data schema).

That sounds like a good idea. Please badger me to do this with all the families I've done so far.

The rest of the suggestions I fully support but they sound more like coding problems which are way beyond me :/

[bradrn]

That sounds like a good idea.

Great, then I’ll implement it when I get time.

Please badger me to do this with all the families I've done so far.

No need: I’m working from the same papers, so I can add the examples myself.

The rest of the suggestions I fully support but they sound more like coding problems which are way beyond me :/

Graphs are really just a data analysis problem. Maps are similar, with the added task of requiring location metadata. Neither is feasible with what we have right now, but once we have search capabilities they should be straightforward.

Improving the representation of suprasegmentals, on the other hand, is a bigger problem. It’s probably something which needs to be fixed within Brassica itself, not just in the ID. I’ve been thinking about it for quite some time, and like I said, I’m unsure how to solve it. (Probably I should make a dedicated discussion thread for the issue at some point.)