Standardizing Phonetic Transcriptions for Kitchen et al.'s Comparative Wordlist on Semitic Languages with Language-Specific Orthography Profile

Abstract

Comparative wordlists are a fundamental tool for tracing language  history, allowing us to see how languages are related, much like  biologists use DNA to infer phylogenies of species. When linguists  compile data from different sources, scholars often code lexical data  differently, using individual transcription systems that cannot be  directly compared with each other. In order to make such data  comparable, individual transcription systems must be unified in order to  reflect a common standard. This study illustrates how such unification  can be done by taking a particularly diverse dataset on Semitic  languages as example and illustrating how transcriptions for individual  language varieties can be harmonized as part of the general  standardization workflow proposed by the Cross-Linguistic Data Formats  initiative.