This is a script to update the the ortography of the existing Ch'ol dictionary into the modern ortography. The script works in 3 steps: first, the ortography is updated in a MDF source file. Second, the entries are reordered to restore alphabetical ordering. Third, the MDF source is converted into LaTeX for printing.
The main script is written in Python and is the file make_dictionary.py. It
uses the file conversion_rules.txt for updating ortography. The final updated
dictionary can be found in pdf/updated-chol-dictionary.pdf.
Make sure you have Python 3 installed. The script was
developed under Python 3.7 and that version is recommended for full
functionality. To check your version of Python, run python3 --version.
To run the script, clone or download the repository and run the main script with Python 3 from within it:
git clone https://github.com/ianvcaldas/chol-dictionary.git
cd chol-dictionary
python3 make_dictionary.py
In case you want to run the test cases, to make sure all ortography conversions are working as intended, make sure you have pytest installed and run it from within the script repository:
cd chol-dictionary
pytest
Custom cases to test ortography conversions can be added by the user by editing
the file test_cases.txt.
Ortography update is done by a series of regular expression string
replacements. All replacements are done according to the file
conversion_rules.txt.
The script loops through the entire dictionary source file in MDF format, and if the current line represents a field in Ch'ol, the ortography for the entry is updated. If it represents any other kind of field, the ortography is left alone. The output of the ortography update is another file in MDF format.
Known bugs with ortography update: Ch'ol words inside a block of Spanish text – for instance, in the "cultural information" entries – are not updated.
After we've produced a new file in MDF format, the order of entries might not be alphabetical anymore due to the ortography changes. To correct this, we do this "realphabetization". This part of the script reorders entries based on standard alphabetical order and prints a new source in MDF format.
Known bugs with realphabetization: Some words have multiple numbered
entries indexed by the MDF field \hm. After realphabetization, these entries
might stop being in the right order. We believe only the following entries, in
the Ch'ol to Spanish dictionary, are affected: joch', ñak, wersa, *wuty, and
yolokña.
The last part of the script converts the source into LaTeX for ease of
compilation and typesetting. The file latex_header.tex includes all the
formatting and typesetting code and is automatically added to the dictionary
when the script make_dictionary.py is run. In order to change the LaTeX
formatting, one would need to change latex_header.py, then re-run
make_dictionary.py to generate a new .tex file, then compile that file
using any LaTeX compiler.
Diccionario chꞌol de Tumbalá, Chiapas, con variaciones dialectales de Tila y Sabanilla is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 and attributed to the original authors and speakers. The dictionary with updated ortography is a derivative work of the above and likewise under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.