Summary of the paper
| Title | Medefaidrin: Resources Documenting the Birth and Death Language Life-cycle |
|---|---|
| Authors | Dafydd Gibbon, Moses Ekpenyong and Eno-Abasi Urua |
| Abstract | Language resources are typically defined and created for application in speechtechnology contexts, but the documentation of languages which are unlikely everto be provided with enabling technologies nevertheless plays an important rolein defining the heritage of a speech community and in the provision of basicinsights into the language oriented components of human cognition. This isparticularly true of endangered languages. The present case study concerns thedocumentation both of the birth and of the endangerment within a rather shortspace of time of a ‘spirit language’, Medefaidrin, created and used as avehicular language by a religious community in South-Eastern Nigeria. Thedocumentation shows phonological, orthographic, morphological, syntactic andtextual typological features of Medefaidrin which indicate that typologicalproperties of English were a model for the creation of the language, ratherthan typological properties of the enclaving language, Ibibio. Thedocumentation is designed as part of the West African Language Archive (WALA),following OLAC metadata standards. |
| Language | Knowledge Discovery/Representation |
| Topics | Endangered languages, Typological databases, Knowledge Discovery/Representation |
Full paper  |
Medefaidrin: Resources Documenting the Birth and Death Language Life-cycle |
| Bibtex | @InProceedings{GIBBON10.342, author = {Dafydd Gibbon, Moses Ekpenyong and Eno-Abasi Urua}, title = {Medefaidrin: Resources Documenting the Birth and Death Language Life-cycle}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Seventh conference on International Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10)}, year = {2010}, month = {may}, date = {19-21}, address = {Valletta, Malta}, editor = {Nicoletta Calzolari (Conference Chair), Khalid Choukri, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Jan Odjik, Stelios Piperidis, Mike Rosner, Daniel Tapias}, publisher = {European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}, isbn = {2-9517408-6-7}, language = {english} } |