List of Languages etc. enhanced

I’ve added a count of entries to the list of languages. I’m getting better with PHP – to do this I had to embed an if statement inside of a foreach statement and it actually worked! I’m still having trouble getting variables to bind, which is frustrating. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t, sometimes I have to refer to row cell, sometimes I have to use a variable. I’m sure there’s a good reason for all of this…

Update…I’ve done a similar thing to the list of glosses. This was more straightforward because there’s nothing in the glosses table with 0 entries. (I’ve removed at from the list, even though it’s in the Swadesh list. We can assume it’s cognate across most languages.)

Compare Enhanced

I’ve added checkboxes to the compare page when the Swadesh option is checked. When these checkboxes are checked, the top of the page runs a tally of all checkboxes and also gives a percentage based on the check count divided by the number of forms returned. This is pretty basic stuff, but it’s my first real experience with Javascript and JQuery, so I’m excited.

I hope this is useful. It will be great to be able to more easily do lexicostatistic glottochronology.

8000 Entries!

We’ve hit 8000 entries. The latest is Altay for ‘which’ – кажы / kažï. There are still 196 glosses without Altay entries, so there’s a lot of work to do still.

Two new glosses

I’ve added two new glosses – shoulder and crow. I dislike adding new glosses to the database because it means I have to go back over all of my sources. In this case, I’d thought a long time about adding these two, and I’ve got my source data in some kind of order.

I’ve also set up this blog to track changes. The about page was getting cluttered, and setting this up is the first step in re-doing the entire site architecture. We’re approaching 8000 entries, which is exciting. I’ve located a pdf Russian-Altay dictionary that I can actually cut and paste from (!!!), so entry 8000 will likely be Altay. At some point I’ll actually finish adding Turkish, which really should be the easiest of all languages, since it’s the best documented.

Past Updates

20 Mar 2018
Set up ability to compare languages. You can also opt to compare only items on the Swadesh list, if that’s your thing. I don’t know if I’ll attempt to make it possible to compare more than two languages – that might be tricky. I’ve been thinking of overhauling the site template (ugh…), especially now that this is up and because I’d like to set up a test of grammar comparison. Up to 7850 entries. Azerbaijani is complete (although I have to enter notes for its language page). The most recent entry is пӧрӱ, which is Mrass Shor for ‘wolf’.
8 Mar 2018
Surpassed 7000 entries! I wanted to finish entering everything for Tòfa, and wanted a round number, so I added some missing Kazakh entries. Since today is International Women’s Day, I thought I’d end with äyel, which is Kazakh for women. This brings the total number of entries to 7050.
All glosses should now have Russian, German, and French equivalents, as well as Doerfer numbers where available.
27 Feb 2018
Fixed error that prevents display of English forms and other data when searching a numeral’s name; this also corrected an error where you couldn’t search for ‘he’ ‘she’ or ‘it’. I ended up using regular expressions to match whole words within several values in the tables. I had hoped to bind the results of the initial query to a later query, but I couldn’t make this work.
I’ve added support for German and French glosses, but so far have only added a couple.
23 Feb 2018
Converted the References page to PHP so I don’t have to enter each reference manually in multiple locations. Instead, the page pulls all references from the database underlying this website. The sort order is less than desirable, but PHP does save a lot of work.
22 Feb 2018
6500 entry added to database – Kuu-Kizhi for far – узак, ыраак. Workaround for issues with Orkhon runes implemented. MySQL does not like Turkic runes!
11 Feb 2018
CSS has been applied to all pages, main site navigation complete
9 Feb 2018
Site template complete. Turkic database is fully functional, with only a few known groups of broken links.
3 Feb 2018
6000th entry added to database – Kondoma Shor for rain – čaŋmur.