I am glad that some of you have expressed interest in building
the databse.
I guess what we need to do next is determine how we can begin
to post our contributions. If any of you have FTP software, I can send you the
password and login and you can upload HTML or Exel documents. If you do not have
the software, you can send me your documents via an e-mail account that I have
set up for the site. In any case, e-mail me directly for the passwords and
logins so I can build a list of contributors and make sure that everyone is
properly credited.
Chris Gwinn
----- Original Message -----From: Piotr GasiorowskiSent: Sunday, January 02, 2000 5:48 AMSubject: [cybalist] Re: Odp: PIE Online Database----- Original Message -----From: Derrick ChapmanSent: Saturday, January 01, 2000 11:52 PMSubject: [cybalist] Re: PIE Online DatabaseAny thoughts on the data elements (fields) for the database?1) PIE word2) Pronunciation3) Meaning(s) and usage4) Source (credit for reconstruction)5) Brief explanation of its reconstruction6) Indo-European cognate offspring
(1) and (2) are not separable, as the PIE reconstruction is supposed to be phonetically based. A brief explanation would be useful in some troublesome cases (e.g. involving complex consonant clusters, metathesis etc.). This could easily be placed under (5), so in my opinion (2) is entirely superfluous.A bare database is not enough. In order to avoid utter confusion we need (from the very start) some kind of standardised transcription and a separate page to lay it out (some explicit transliteration conventions will also be necessary to deal with the orthography of cognates quoted under (6)).A short guide to PIE root structure, ablaut and word morphology would be very useful, plus a few simple tables to illustrate the most common declension and conjugation patterns -- but this can wait a while.Piotr
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