Grassfields Bantu Fieldwork: Ngomba Tone Paradigms

Steven Bird and John Bell

Language expert: Joseph Petiogwe
Language advisor: Scott Satre (SIL)

Introduction

Grassfields Bantu Fieldwork: Ngomba Tone Paradigms was produced by Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) catalog number LDC2001S16 and ISBN 1-58563-216-3. Please see below for information regarding its collection, processing, and contents.

The data contains tone paradigms of the language Ngomba, a Bamileke (Grassfields Bantu) language spoken by some 63,000 people in the Western Province of Cameroon. Ngomba's tone system is undescribed, but it has many similarities with the closely related Yémba language (also known as Bamileke Dschang).

Data

There are 23 paradigm pages in html format. Each page lists 32 utterances, varying across subject, verb, and object. Each utterance has a link to a recording in .wav format. Phonetic and tonological transcriptions have been done for every utterance.

Please see the paradigm index for a listing of the paradigm pages with links to each page.

There is also a set of raw sound files, each one of which contains the complete recording of one of the tenses. For each paradigm recording there are also laryngograph recordings and label files included.

Please see the rawdata index for a listing of the raw files.

Please see the doc directory for the documentation files.

Please see the file.tbl for a complete list of files.

Speaker Information:

Joseph Petiogwe was born in 1959 in Bamenjinda, and lived in the language area until twenty years of age, when he moved to Yaoundé.

References:

Ngouagna, Jean Pierre (1988). Esquisse phonologique du Ngomba,    Department of African Languages and Linguistics, University of Yaoundé
Satre, Scott A (1997). Phonological sketch of Ngomba,    SIL, B.P. 1299, Yaoundé.
Watters, John R. and Jacqueline Leroy (1989), Southern Bantoid,    In Bendor-Samuel, John (ed) The Niger-Congo Languages
   Lanham, MD: University Press of America, pp 430-49.

Production Information

Recorded: June 21, 1997, Recording Studio of SIL Cameroon, Yaoundé

Digitized, Labelled and Segmented: 1997-1998 Phonetics Laboratory, University of Edinburgh

Transcribed and Annotated: 1998-2001 LDC, University of Pennsylvania

Sponsorship:
SIL Cameroon
Economic and Social Research Council (UK) Grant R000235540
National Science Foundation (US) Grant 9983258
Linguistic Data Consortium

LDC#: LDC2001S16

ISBN: 1-58563-216-3


Online Materials

The verbal tone paradigms are also accessible over the internet, along with an interface for browsing and editing transcriptions, at http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Projects/grassfields

Updates

Additional information, updates and bug fixes may be available in the LDC catalog entry for this corpus LDC2001S16.

Editors

Steven Bird <sb@ldc.upenn.edu>
University of Pennsylvania

John Bell <jmbell@ldc.upenn.edu>
University of Pennsylvania

Content Copyright

© 2001 Steven Bird and John Bell.


Contact: ldc@ldc.upenn.edu
© 2002 Linguistic Data Consortium, Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania. All Rights Reserved.