The Alaskan Athabascan Grammar Database

The Alaskan Athabascan Grammar Database Sebastian Nordhoff, Siri Tuttle, Olga Lovick Glottotopia, Alaska Native Language Center, First Nations University of Canada Berlin, Fairbanks, Regina sebastian.nordhoff@glottotopia.de, sgtuttle@alaska.edu, olga@lithophile.com Abstract This paper describes a repository of example sentences in three endangered Athabascan languages: Koyukon, Upper Tanana, Lower Tanana. The repository allows researchers or language teachers to browse the example sentence corpus to either investigate the languages or to prepare teaching materials. The originally heterogeneous text collection was imported into a SOLR store via the POIO bridge. This paper describes the requirements, implementation, advantages and drawbacks of this approach and discusses the potential to apply it for other languages of the Athabascan family or beyond. Keywords: Athabascan languages, linguistic examples, least-resourced languages 1. Introduction This paper presents the Alaskan Athabascan Grammar Database (AAGD). The goal of this database is to make available comparable annotated grammar examples from all eleven Athabascan languages, drawn from texts, lexicons, grey literature and new fieldwork, accessible to researchers and community members. This poses a number of technical and concep- tual challenges, which will be explored in this paper. 2. Athabascan languages The Athabascan language family numbers comprises over 40 languages (Mithun, 1999). Of those 11 are spoken in Alaska, with a total number of speakers of about 5300. These are: Ahtna, Deg Xinag, Denaina/Tanaina, Gwichin, H¨an, Holikachuk, Koyukon, Lower Tanana, Middle Ta- nana, Tanacross, Upper Tanana, Upper Kuskokwim. Lan- guages in bold are included in the first phase of the project. As far as the orthography is concerned, the languages are written in the standard Latin alphabet with the following special characters: accents for tone, ogoneks for nasaliza- tion, <ł> for the lateral fricative, and diacritics and di- graphs marking language-specific contrasts. Standardization of orthographic conventions is not com- plete for two of the languages, and both phonemic invento- ries and orthographies vary considerably, so that automated generalizations across languages are difficult to achieve. Athabascan languages are known for their complex mor- phology. An example is given in (1). (1) Neeghonoheedekkaanh. Nee- TERM- gho- PPOST- no- REV- h- 3PL.SBJ- ∅- ∅.CNJ- ee- PFV- de- D.CLF- kkaanh paddle.PFV ‘They paddle back to shore.’ (Koyukon) (1) illustrates that a fully inflected Athabascan verb form can convey a complete utterance. This could be taken to suggest that verbs are isomorphic with sentences, and that there is no syntax outside the verb. While this is not a seri- ous claim, it is still the case that syntactic research in Atha- bascan languages considerably lags behind that on mor- phology cf. (Rice, 2000, 1) and phonology. 3. Use case The long term goal of this project is to make all existing textual data from the Athabascan languages in Alaska dig- itally available for (syntactic) research, complemented by new field data for the languages where data is lacking and where collection is still possible. There is a vast amount of grey literature for those languages (unpublished theses, manuscripts, legacy computer files on researchers’ comput- ers). Making this accessible to researchers and language learners is …

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