Yapese Corpora

This corpus is split into two parts. The first, the Honolulu Corpus of Written Yapese, was collected at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa in the spring of 2001. The source materials for the corpus come from various upper elementary school readers first published in the late seventies by the Yap State Education Department and later gathered together by PREL (Pacific Resources for Education and Learning) and published in 1999 as a CD-ROM entitled PALM (Pacific Area Learning Materials). These materials are available on the web at http://www.prel.org/PALM/index.asp. The Honolulu Corpus consists of four texts. Three of these (Thiliig Kaakaroom (A Long Ago Storm), L’agruw i Maabgol (The Married Couple) and Beaq ni ba Moqon ngea ba Raan' i Moongkii  (A Man and a Troop of Monkeys)) are fictional narratives. The fourth, Guwchiig (Dolphins), is an expository text which contains three short narratives. The corpus materials were translated by Stella Kolinski. Keira Gebbie Ballantyne prepared the interlinearized texts and edited the translations.

The second part of the corpus, the Colonia Corpus of Spoken Yapese, was collected in Yap in late 2002. It consists of three interviews. The first of these, Schooldays, is a short text in which Angela Y. Kenrad interviews Sherri Manna’ about her experiences at a Yapese school in the 1950s. In M’uw Nu Wa’ab (Canoes of Yap), Mr. Walter Chieng is interviewed by Angela Y. Kenrad on the subject of traditional Yapese canoes. The third interview, Dapael, concerns the traditional practices surrounding menarch and menstruation. The word dapael refers to the land and houses set aside for menstruating women and women at menarche. The interviewee in this case has requested that her name not be made public. The texts in the Colonia Corpus were transcribed and translated by Sherri Manna’ and Angela Y. Kenrad. Keira Gebbie Ballantyne edited the translations and prepared the interlinearized version of the texts.

Using the corpora

You are welcome to use the materials in this corpus for academic and scholarly purposes. If you would like to use materials from the Honolulu Corpus, please acknowledge both the corpus and the original source of the materials. For the Colonia Corpus, please acknowledge the corpus as well as the speaker.

I'd appreciate hearing about your research with these materials.
You can contact me by email at ballanty at hawaii dot edu.

For optimal viewing of pdf files, please rotate the pdf window for landscape orientation.

Honolulu Corpus of Written Yapese

Colonia Corpus of Spoken Yapese

Yapese Texts

These texts are edited versions of the interview transcriptions, and are intended for readers of Yapese. No translation accompanies these texts.

Rogon ni yoeg Walter Chieng ngaak’ Angela Y. Kenrad ngea Sheri Manna’ ngea Keira Ballantyne

Dapael  

Rogon nnoeg ngaak’ Angela Y. Kenrad ngea Sheri Manna’ ngea Keira Ballantyne

Interlinearized Texts

Schooldays             pdf version

Angela Y. Kenrad interviews Sherri Manna’ about her schooldays on Yap.
550 words

M’uw nu Wa’ab (Canoes of Yap) [pdf] 

Angela Y. Kenrad interviews Mr. Walter Chieng about traditional Yapese canoes.
1454 words

Dapael (Menstrual Houses) [pdf] 

Interview conducted by Sherri Manna’ on the subject of traditional customs surrounding menstruation and menarche.
1409 words
The Getting of Wisdom in the Pacific, Michelle Young's article on Dapael and oral histories in Australian Volunteer Magazine.

Acknowledgements

Thanks are extended to Mr. Walter Chieng and the interviewee in Dapael for their time and assistance on this matter, and for their permission to make these materials available to the community. Mr. Leo Pugrum at YapSEED is thanked for his generous help with this project. Funding for Yapese fieldwork came from the Arts and Sciences Advisory Council, University of Hawai'i at Mānoa; from the Mildred Towle Scholarship for International Students; and from the Department of Linguistics, University of Hawai'i at Mānoa. The generous assistance of Dr. Roderick Jacobs was instrumental in securing funding for the Honolulu corpus. Thanks are due also to PREL for their permission to reuse these materials. Dr. Ken Rehg, Dr. Robert Blust, Dr. Miriam Meyerhoff, and Dr. Yuko Otsuka provided much appreciated guidance on the practice of fieldwork and on linguistic analysis. Ka ga gargaed!

Tech Stuff

The corpus files were originally uploaded as PDF files. Interlinearization is done in tables in Word and then printed as a PDF. You can run Adobe searches on the files and you'll get an output of the search term with some surrounding context.

I'm currently working on encoding the corpus in XML. Files will appear in xml format intermittently, as I finish coding them. Internet Explorer doesn't like you to see the source code, but you can see it with Mozilla.  If you want to peek under the hood ~ bonnet of the XSL stylesheet I've used, you can see it here. 

The annotation schema I've used for the XML encoding is here. It includes the key to abbreviations in the interlinear glosses.

If you are engaged in a similar project, I've found the tutorials at W3Schools enormously helpful in learning to write xml and xsl code. I found out how to enter special characters here.

You can produce concordances from these texts (and other xml text) by using the TAPOR (Text Analysis Portal for Research) tool, developed by Geoffry Rockwell, Lian Yan and Matt Patey, at McMaster University.

The next step on my tech wishlist is to insert a user interface directly on this page which allows users to produce concordances. I don't know how to do this yet, but if you do, I'd love to hear from you! (keiraballantyne at gmail dot com).