LexiRumah: An online lexical database of the Lesser Sunda Islands

Abstract

The Lesser Sunda Islands in eastern Indonesia cover a longitudinal distance of some 600 kilometres. They are the westernmost place where languages of the Austronesian family come into contact with a family of Papuan languages and constitute an area of high linguistic diversity. Despite its diversity, the Lesser Sundas are little studied and for most of the region, written historical records, as well as archaeological and ethnographic data are lacking. In such circumstances the study of relationships between languages through their lexicon is a unique tool for making inferences about human (pre-)history and tracing population movements. However, the lack of a collective body of lexical data has severely limited our understanding of the history of the languages and peoples in the Lesser Sundas. The LexiRumah database fills this gap by assembling lexicons of Lesser Sunda languages from published and unpublished sources, and making those lexicons available online in a consistent format. This database makes it possible for researchers to explore the linguistic data collated from different primary sources, to formulate hypotheses on how the languages of the two families might be internally related and to compare competing hypotheses about subgroupings and language contact in the region. In this article, we present observations from aggregating lexical data from sources of different type and quality, including fieldwork, and generalize our lessons learned towards practical guidelines for creating a consistent database of comparable lexical items, derived from the design and development of LexiRumah. Databases like this are instrumental in developing theories of language evolution and change in understudied regions where small-scale, pre-industrial, pre-literate societies are the majority. It is therefore vital to follow reliable design choices when creating such databases, as described in this paper.

The dispersal of Austronesian languages in Island South East Asia: Current findings and debates

“…More recently, (parts of) basic vocabulary word lists of many (but by no means all) MP languages have been made publically available through online lexical databases such as the Austronesian Basic Vocabulary Database (ABVD; Greenhill, Blust, & Gray, 2008) and FIGURE 4 Rake-like tree of Austronesian languages (Adelaar, 2005;Donohue & Grimes, 2008;Ross, 1995Ross, , 2005 LexiRumah (Kaiping & Klamer, 2018). 4 However, traditional comparative work on such data sets remains limited, mostly because the available (funding of) manpower for this labor intensive work is scarce.…”

NorthEuraLex: a wide-coverage lexical database of Northern Eurasia

“…The most basic prerequisite for any computational study in historical linguistics is an electronic database which contains the information a linguist would look up in dictionaries or other sources in a machine-readable format. The absence of such databases has been one of the limiting factors to the development of the field, but some very useful resources have become available during the past decade (Dunn 2015;Greenhill et al 2008;Wichmann et al 2016), and the pace at which new & Johannes Dellert johannes.dellert@uni-tuebingen.de resources appear is accelerating (Greenhill 2015;Bowern 2016;Kaiping and Klamer 2018). While the number of large-scale lexical databases is increasing, most of them systematically cover only about 100 or 200 very basic concepts for each language.…”

“…Due to the complicated legal situation when publishing full resources, and history-induced hesitancy of many linguistic groups when it comes to giving outsiders access to their languages, only 150,000 of 780,000 database entries are freely available at the moment. The LexiRumah database by Kaiping and Klamer (2018) summarizes the result of extensive fieldwork on the languages of the Indonesian islands of Alor and Pantar, many of which are Papuan (i.e. non-Austronesian) languages, with an average of 337 concepts across 101 language varieties.…”

Automated methods for the investigation of language contact, with a focus on lexical borrowing

“…The past two decades have seen a drastic increase of quantitative applications in historical linguistics and linguistic typology, witnessed by multiple articles dealing with the automation of formerly exclusively manual tasks, such as phylogenetic reconstruction (Gray & Atkinson, ; Holman et al, ), word comparison (Kondrak, ; List, Greenhill, & Gray, ; Prokić, Wieling, & Nerbonne, ), semantic change (Dellert, ; Eger & Mehle, ; Steiner, Stadler, & Cysouw, ), and regular sound correspondences (Brown, Holman, & Wichmann, ; Kondrak, ; List, ). The quantitative turn was specifically favored by the compilation of large databases, offering cross‐linguistic accounts on typological structures (Dryer & Haspelmath, ; Polyakov & Solovyev, ), lexical cognates (Greenhill, Blust, & Gray, ; Matisoff, ; Starostin, ), lexical data in general (Dellert & Jäger, ; Kaiping & Klamer, ), phoneme inventories (Maddieson, Flavier, Marsico, Coupé, & Pellegrino, ; Moran, McCloy, & Wright, ), and polysemies (List et al, ).…”