Grassfields Bantu Fieldwork: Dschang Lexicon

Steven Bird

Language experts:
Albert Tsomejio (Bafou Dschang),
Eric Tsakem (Bafou Dschang).

Introduction

This file contains documentation on Grassfields Bantu Fieldwork: Dschang Lexicon, Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) catalog number LDC2003L01 and ISBN 1-58563-255-4.

The data contains a lexicon of the language Yémba (Bamileke Dschang), a Bamileke (Grassfields Bantu) language spoken by 300,000+ people in Southwestern Cameroon.

Data

There are two sets of pages in HTML format: one set is 28 pages, and the other is 105. In the first set, one page lists every word in the lexicon that begins with a given letter (or letter combination). In the second set, one page lists approximately 25 entries, unless there are fewer than 25 entries beginning with a given letter. The second set is more convenient for use on slower machines.

Each entry under a headword has links to 2 or more soundfiles. Two speakers were recorded; a given entry generally contains links to utterances of the headword by both speakers, as well as a laryngograph recording of the headword by the second speaker. Nouns may also have links to pronunciations of the plurals, and verbs may have links to pronunciations of the imperative and infinitive forms. These ancillary forms will in general also have laryngograph recordings.

Please see the lexicon index for a listing of the lexicon pages by initial letter.

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

Please go to the doc directory for the documentation files.

Speaker Information:

Albert Tsomejio is from Bafou, Dschang. He was born in 1964 in Aga in Bafou and has lived in the language area for most of his life. His mother was also from Aga, and his father was from Meng Ala'.

Eric Tsakem is from Bafou, Dschang and was born in 1966. He has lived in the language area for most of his life. Both of his parents came from near Saamaya.

References:

Petit Dictionnaire Yémba-Français (Dschang-French Dictionary), Cameroon: ANACLAC. [ps] [pdf]

Production Information

Recorded: May 1997, Dschang, recording studio of SIL Cameroon, Yaoundé

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

Annotated: 1998-2002 LDC, University of Pennsylvania

Sponsorship:

SIL Cameroon

Economic and Social Research Council (UK) Grant R000235540

National Science Foundation (US) Grant 9983258

Linguistic Data Consortium

Credits: I am indebted to the following people for helping with the collection and publication of this material:
Gretchen Harro, Nancy Haynes, Maurice Tadadjeu, John Bell, & Nori Heikkinen.

LDC#: LDC2003L01

ISBN: 1-58563-255-4

Updates

Additional information, updates and bug fixes may be available in the LDC catalog entry for this corpus LDC2003L01.