In the following sections, we give some hints how to use the CLDF data in this repository to answer common questions. To access the CSV data, we use the tools provided with csvkit, which you should install to follow along.
Inspecting cldf/parameters.csv
we see that the phoneme inventory
of a language is spread over 4 different parameters:
Consonant_inventory,Consonant inventory,,Sound inventory,categorical,yes
Vowel_inventory,Vowel inventory,,Sound inventory,categorical,yes
Geminate_inventory,Geminate inventory,,Sound inventory,categorical,yes
Diphtong_inventory,Diphtong inventory,,Sound inventory,categorical,yes
Vowel_sequence_inventory,Vowel sequence inventory,,Sound inventory,categorical,yes
All four parameters have
- an
ID
ending ininventory
, - are specified as
categorical
, thus their allowed values can be looked up incldf/codes.csv
, - are specified as
multichoice
parameters, i.e. a language may have more than one value for each of these parameters.
This information is the input for the following sequence of csvkit
commands:
$ csvjoin -c Code_ID,ID cldf/values.csv cldf/codes.csv | \
csvgrep -c Language_ID -m yue | \
csvgrep -c Parameter_ID -r"inventory$" | \
csvcut -c Parameter_ID,Name
Parameter_ID,Name
Consonant_inventory,/p
Consonant_inventory,t
Consonant_inventory,k
Consonant_inventory,kʷ
Consonant_inventory,pʰ
Consonant_inventory,tʰ
Consonant_inventory,kʰ
Consonant_inventory,kʷʰ
Consonant_inventory,t͡s
Consonant_inventory,t͡sʰ
Consonant_inventory,f
Consonant_inventory,s
Consonant_inventory,h
Consonant_inventory,m
Consonant_inventory,n
Consonant_inventory,ŋ
Consonant_inventory,l
Consonant_inventory,j
Consonant_inventory,w/
Vowel_inventory,/i
Vowel_inventory,y
Vowel_inventory,e
Vowel_inventory,ø
Vowel_inventory,a
Vowel_inventory,ɑ
Vowel_inventory,ɔ
Vowel_inventory,u/
Diphtong_inventory,/ai
Diphtong_inventory,ɑi
Diphtong_inventory,au
Diphtong_inventory,ɑu
Diphtong_inventory,ei
Diphtong_inventory,øi
Diphtong_inventory,iu
Diphtong_inventory,ui
Diphtong_inventory,oi
Diphtong_inventory,ou/