Linguistics
Room 102, Chandler House, 2 Wakefield Street, London WC1N 1PF
I am studying for a PhD in phonology with John Harris and Jamie White. I am working on the question "Can we develop an objective metric of phonological language distance?". This frequently involves working on the related question "Can computational tools increase collaboration and the quality and quantity of available data?"
I have written a database and web tools for comparing segment distributions between languages and dialects. It can be used for finding loan words, finding elicitation items for experiments, figuring out a phonemic inventory from phonetic transcriptions, figuring out syllable structure, comparing patterns across languages, comparing different phonemic analyses of the same data, locating marginal patterns, and more.
It is currently in beta, and I would welcome any feedback. It can be found here: nidaba.co.uk
The database currently contains lexicons for Welsh, German, Greek, English, French, Irish, Cheke Holo, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, Sylheti, Ambel, and Matbat.
I hope to add more Oceanic, Indo-Aryan, Bantu, and Germanic languages - as well as every other language family! If you have a lexicon for a language or dialect, be it 300 words or 30,000, please register on the website and upload it. And let me know at me at elizabeth.eden.11@ucl.ac.uk.
Mark Huckvale (UCL) has written a tool for measuring accent distance based on vowel production, which has been successfully applied to different native accents of English. I am extending this to speakers of other languages.
The data from my pilot project is here
If you would be interested in collaborating on this project, please get in touch. I would like to run the experiment in as many languages as possible, and for that I need lots of non-English speakers, preferably in their home countries.
Upcoming: September 2017. Nidaba - Lexicon database and configurable segmental analysis tools (Poznan Linguistics Meeting)
Thursday 12 May, 2016 Sylheti Syllable Structure (SOAS Sylheti Conference)
Tuesday 7 June, 2016 DistDB - A segment distribution and language distance database (SOAS Linguistics Seminar)
2013 MA Linguistics, UCL
2010 MSci Physics, Imperial College London / Université Paris-Sud (XI)