Phonological Software

[Ryan....@gmail.com]

Mike,

I was wondering how you organize your data. I just spend a day and a
half downloading and playing around with various SIL programs like
Toolbox, Phonebox, and Ptest to try and search for minimal pairs with
software that I could double check by hand. I thought it would save
time but I have absolutely nothing to show for it after all the time I
spent trying to get them to work. I have no major problems looking at
word initial and word final lists to compare but the word medial lists
give me a headache just to look at them. Any advice?

Ryan

[Mike]

I hear you on this one, Ryan :) Looking for word-medial pairs
requires much more visual and mental juggling of variables than word-
initial or word-final pairs. I wish I was more familiar with software
that could help us do this. It would be neat if we could find
something that would list all the words containing phones word-
initially, medially, and finally first by syllable structure and then
by preceding and following phones. This would make it so much easier
to compare words! Of course, we can always do it by hand after we
export the lists from Phonology Assistant to a Word document, but
that's a lot of work. Surely there's a way to get the software to do
this! I'll see if I can talk with someone who has more experience
with the software.

For the word-medial lists, I've found it helpful to increase the space
around the particular phone in question when I generate the list in
Phonology Assistant, before I export it to a Word document. It makes
it easier on the eyes for me. For instance, the word [kudook] appears
as [ku d ook] on my Word document [d] phone list (without the square
brackets, though).

I'll let you know as soon as I find out something about better ways to
sort phone lists.

On Dec 3, 2:29 am, "Ryan.Lo...@gmail.com" <Ryan.Lo...@gmail.com>
wrote: