Re: [SHOEBOX] Null Morphemes

On Sun, 23 Jul 2000, The Gray Wizard wrote:

> Does anyone use any of the other tools listed on the SIL site.  Having
> tasted the joys of Shoebox, I wonder what other goodies lay there waiting to
> be sampled.
About 8 yrs ago I was working as a research assistent to Wick Miller;
my job was to type and gloss Shoshoni oral narratives from his field
notes. We used SIL's IT program. From the Shoebox discussion, it seems
to be a stand-alone portion of the Shoebox package, since all it did
was to enable interlinear glossing by aligning morphemes with their
glosses and keeping track of lexical information. I found it to be
rather limited and primarily suitable for agglutinative or straight-
forwardly inflectional or analytic languages (such as Shoshoni). I
tried once to do some things in Tepa with it, but with Tepa's rampant
non-concatenative morphology and my general ineptitude with software
generally, it wasn't worth the effort. Shoebox seems to be a much more
flexible tool, and I have a little more self-confidence WRT to
software tools these days.

I do use the free fonts. In my dissertation I used SIL IPA Doulos, but
my new favorite is the sans-serif SIL IPA Sophia since it provides a
nice visual contrast with the surrounding Times text.

Dirk

--
Dirk Elzinga
dirk.elzinga@m.cc.utah.edu