Cross-Linguistic Transcription Systems

This repository provides the data underlying the "cross-linguistic transcription systems" project (CLTS [siː ɛl tʰiː ɛs]), which offers transcription systems and transcription data for various sources. Please see CONTRIBUTING.md for more information on how to contribute.

Master data

This repository contains files that are generated by running commands from the pyclts package, intended to help with curation. Thus, it is important to know where master (or authoritative) copies of certain data types live (i.e. where to edit data).

• References: data/references.bib
• Feature system: pkg/transcriptionsystems/features.json
• BIPA transcription system: pkg/transcriptionsystems/bipa/
• Index of source datasets: sources/index.tsv
• Source datasets: sources/*/graphemes.tsv

CLDF Dataset

CLDF Metadata: cldf-metadata.json

Sources: data/references.bib

The Cross-Linguistic Transcription Systems (CLTS) project provides a catalog of speech sounds aggregated from (and linked to) phonetic notation systems from various sources.

property	value
dc:conformsTo	CLDF Generic
dc:identifier	https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3515744

Table sources/index.tsv

CLTS is compiled from information about transcriptions and how these relate to sounds from many sources, such as phoneme inventory databases like PHOIBLE or relevant typological surveys.

property	value
dc:extent	33

Columns

Name/Property	Datatype	Description
NAME	string	Primary key
DESCRIPTION	string
REFS	list of string (separated by , )	References data/references.bib::BibTeX-key
TYPE	string Valid choices: td ts sc	CLTS groups transcription information into three categories: Transcription systems (ts), transcription data (td) and soundclass systems (sc).
URITEMPLATE	string	Several CLTS sources provide an online catalog of the graphemes they describe. If this is the case, the URI template specified in this column was used to derive the URL column in graphemes.csv.

Table data/features.tsv

The feature system employed by CLTS describes sounds by assigning values for certain features (constrained by sound type). The permissible values per (feature, sound type) are listed in this table.

property	value
dc:extent	163

Columns

Name/Property	Datatype	Description
ID	string	Primary key
TYPE	string Valid choices: consonant vowel tone	CLTS distinguishes the basic sound types consonant, vowel, tone, and marker. Features are defined for consonants, vowels, and tones.
FEATURE	string	Note that CLTS features are not necessarily binary.
VALUE	string

Table data/graphemes.tsv

property	value
dc:extent	81895

Columns

Name/Property	Datatype	Description
PK	integer	Primary key
GRAPHEME	string	Grapheme used in a particular transcription to denote a sound
NAME	string	The ordered concatenation of feature values of the denoted sound References data/sounds.tsv::NAME
BIPA	string	The grapheme for the denoted sound in the Broad IPA transcription system
DATASET	string	Links to the source of this grapheme References sources/index.tsv::NAME
FREQUENCY	integer
URL	anyURI	URL of the grapheme in its source online database
IMAGE	string	Image of the typeset grapheme.
SOUND	string	Audio recording of the sound being pronounced.
EXPLICIT	string	Indicates whether the mapping of grapheme to sound was done manually (explicitly, +) or whether it was inferred from the Grapheme.
FEATURES	string	Features of the sound as described in the local feature system of the source dataset
NOTE	string

Table data/sounds.tsv

property	value
dc:extent	8765

Columns

Name/Property	Datatype	Description
ID	string
NAME	string	Ordered list of features + sound type Primary key
FEATURES	list of string (separated by )	Ordered list of feature values for the sound. References data/features.tsv::ID
GRAPHEME	string	CLTS choses the BIPA grapheme as canonical representative of the graphemes mapped to a sound.
UNICODE	list of string (separated by /)	Unicode character names of the codepoints in GRAPHEME
GENERATED	boolean	Indicates whether the sound was inferred by our algorithmic procedure (which is active for all diphthongs, all cluster sounds, but also all sounds which we do not label explicitly) or whether no inference was needed, since the sound is explicitly defined.
TYPE	string Valid choices: consonant vowel diphthong tone cluster	CLTS defines five sound types: consonant, vowel, tone, diphthong, and cluster. The latter two are always GENERATED.
NOTE	string