Lectures by Nepali researchers

Seminarium

As part of an ongoing project collaboration supported by the Swedish Research Links Program, a group of Nepali researchers are visiting the SCCIIL Interdisciplinary center April 30 - May 6.

The research concerns documentation of language and culture in Nepal, especially the Lohorung culture and language, with the help of ICT using crowd sourcing, the creation of a multimodal dictionary and a Nepali spoken language corpus.

On Thursday May 3, there will be a workshop where the Nepali researchers present their work in a series of five talks. This is an invitation to interested researchers to attend the talks, which will take place at the IT University at Lindholmen, House Patricia. The lecture room will be posted in the entrance hall.

WELCOME!

Program:
13.15-14.00: Self documentation of language and culture: Concept, tools, and the contribution of the Lohorung multimodal online dictionary, Bhim Regmi Sagun Dhakwa

Language documentation and language vitalization can be combined to serve a language community's needs empowering the community with technical facilities, knowledge and skill to generate, maintain, and utilize language resources. The Lohorung multimodal online dictionary, a collection of different applications that aims to serve as a tool for dictionary creation, data collection and transcription, has been developed to realize this concept. The tool, developed in consultation with and run by community members, supports collection and sharing of information through visual and auditory modes along with writing. The talk covers the whole process of development, the progress achieved so far, and further plans for the Lohorung multimodal online dictionary.

14.00-14.45: Lohorung online multimodal dictionary for Android App, Sagun Dhakhwa

Since the Lohorung Online Multimodal Dictionary is in the final stages of development, the next step will be to reach mobile phone users. I will discuss the challenges in developing a multimodal dictionary android app. I will also discuss other small tools that we have developed while developing the online Lohorung Dictionary.

14.45-15.30 Lohorung culture as traced from the titles of videorecorded activities in a database for cultural documentation, Bhim Regmi

This talk presents findings from a preliminary study of the Lohorung multimodal spoken language data. There have been 148 recordings in total which includes 117 audio and 31 video files. The titles of the recordings have been taken as data and analysed for a preliminary outline of Lohorung culture which can serve as a basis for further collection and analysis of data. The titles have been classified into instruments, farm products, food and drinks, animal/bird products, material products, forest, actions, professions, social relations, rites and rituals, cloths and ornaments. This classified list provides a sketch of Lohorung culture. The interpretation made on the basis of the titles is also supported also by an analysis of the contents.

15.30-16.00 Break

16.00-16.45 Location of Lohorung in Kiranti, Madhav P Pokharel

This presentation is based on the lexical similarity in the Kiranti languages in relation to the Basic Vocabulary of Morris Swadesh. Lohorung is the focus of this historical comparative analysis. Lohorung is a Kiranti language spoken in the Sankhuwa Sabha district of eastern Nepal. Kiranti is a pronominalized Tibeto-Burman language of the Sino-Tibetan language family. We have compared the cognates of 31 lexical items (BIG, BIRD, BITE, BLOOD, BURN, COLD, COME, DIE, DOG, DRINK, EAR, EAT, EYE, FLY, GIVE, (S)HE, HEAR, I, KILL, LOUSE, NAME, NOSE, PATH, SLEEP, STONE, SUN, TAIL, TOOTH, WHO, WOMAN and YOU) and a grammatical item (negative affix). The Kiranti languages we have chosen for comparison are 23 in number (Athpariya, Bahing, Bantawa, Chamling, Chhiling, Chhintang, Dumi, Dungmali, Jerong, Koyu, Kulung, Limbu, Lohorung, Mewahang, Mugali, Nachhiring, Puma, Sampang, Thulung, Tilung, Umbule, Yakkha and Yamphu. Based on this comparison we have found that none of the Kiranti languages are very close to Lohorung. The closest language on this comparison is Sampang which has only 53% similarity. Other languages are farther than Sampang along the following scale: Bantawa/Nachhiring (47%), Yamphu (41%), Mewahang/Kulung (38%), Chhintang (34%), Yakkha/Mugali (31%), and Chamling/Limbu (25%). Other languages like Puma/Dungmali, Chhiling, Bahing/Dumi, Umbule, Thulung, Jerong and Tilung gradually farther and lower than Chamling/Limbu.

16.45-17.30 Current state of the Nepali spoken language corpus, Ram Kisun

In this talk, I will discuss the overall progress and current state of the Nepali spoken language corpus - a corpus of 60 hours' video and audio-video recordings along with their phonemic transcription in Devanagari. I will share our experience of developing this social activity based spoken language corpus, in which features like overlap, pause and silence has been annotated for about 40 hours of transcription.