Linguistic & Technical Notes

The Tujia texts in this language archive were transcribed with the assistance of a native speaker who listened carefully to the recorded data many times in our presence. Uncorrected speech errors in the audio data are indicated in the transcription by replacing them with the correct form enclosed in square brackets. Chinese borrowings are indicated in italics in the transcription. The distinction between affixes and free-standing words is not always clear. In general we have given morphemes a hyphen and attached them to the preceding morpheme (or, in the case of the one prefix, the following word) if they (i) show tone sandhi and are hence phonologically bound and/or (ii) show tight bonding to a single word class, e.g. verb suffixes. Hyphenated morphemes in category (ii) are marked as either nsuff or vsuff as appropriate in the word list and the popup glosses. The remaining hyphenated morphemes, i.e. those in category (i) but not category (ii), are marked as suff and should be considered to be clitics or phrasal affixes.

This website was developed for viewing with Internet Explorer; audio replay is not available when the website is viewed with Netscape browsers.

The audio material in this archive was recorded with a hand-held Panasonic RQ-A170 portable stereo cassette recorder and an Atus ATR-20 unidirectional dynamic microphone, and mastered as a mono, 16-bit, 22.05kHz digital waveform. The audio data provided on the website is, however, 8-bit and 11.025kHz due to bandwidth limitations. Major pauses and speech errors were first excised and then noise reduction was performed using CoolEdit v2.0. The data was transcribed with extensive help from Lu Meiyan, and using the author's Cassette Player software. The transcriptions and a word list were developed and maintained in parallel using the SIL Shoebox program. The Shoebox databases were preprocessed with the author's Posh software and the resultant output read by a Perl script to auto-generate the HTML pages in this archive.