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You're a linguist,
trained in the comparative method. You work with colleagues on a
family of languages, and you'd like to explore Wordcorr as a tool
for doing it.
Good! This Web site
explains what Wordcorr does. It will help you download the Wordcorr program and get it set up on your computer. It teaches you how to use Wordcorr on your own data.
It takes linguistic data archiving seriously and shows you
how to set up for it. It will eventually help you get in touch with
others whose interests match yours, by plugging you into the
Wordcorr Community -- but that part isn't ready yet.
Four Tasks. There are four main tasks
that Wordcorr helps you perform over and over. Click to read more
about each one:
- Enter
and edit data.
- Annotate
the data to show your linguistic judgments.
- Tabulate
the annotated data to get correspondence sets.
- Refine
the results.
Cataloguing Information. Before you can
get going with Wordcorr, you need to provide some cataloguing information (also called
"identifying information" and "metadata") so
that your data can eventually be archived permanently. Click to see
each kind.
After you've finished looking at this and
following out some links, click here to go to New user. |
Wordcorr gives you a set of tools for comparative
phonology, but it assumes you already know something about the
comparative method. You get a brief introduction in most
introductory linguistics courses, and you probably have gone
considerably beyond that.
Wordcorr won't do your thinking
for you; but it will keep track of your judgments without losing
any of them.
If what you've seen so far sounds
strange to you, but interesting, there's a do-it-yourself option.
Get a copy of Lyle Campbell's Introduction to Historical
Linguistics (second edition,
MIT Press, 2004) and work your way through at least Chapter 5. Use
Wordcorr to do the major exercises.
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