Index Diachronica Database Project

The Index Diachronica as a database

What is it?

The Index Diachronica Database Project aims to convert the Index Diachronica, a collection of historical sound changes, into a text-based database and mantain and solidify the dataset.

The Index Diachronica is a giant catalog of sound changes and is very large. It hassections on many languages and language families, as well as a fairly well-structured presentation of historical sound changes in those languages. It is hosted here: Index

@amundo and @man-in-space had the idea to convert this document into a database of json files, because then the rules are data, and we can do all kinds of neat things with them.

However there has been no activity on the project since 8 years. So I sneakily decided to fork the project and actually do it for real.

Roadmap

July: release v0.1.0
till September: decide on format
after that: start checking the rules, fix broken stuff and search new sound changes

Notes

sound changes and references will be converted into a standard format
The Index Diachronica (usually) includes references. This means that the database could be checkable by experts in various fields.
There are phonological inventories mixed into the soundchanges. Inventories are awesome, but they are a separate project. It would make sense to have a separate project, (perhaps we could call it the Index Phonologica!) to handle that. ()

The format

the following briefly outlines the format of the natural classes ID uses. For the reasoning please refer to [rants/features.md] all the classes will remain close to the source but transcribed into [+bla -blub]. The list of available natural classes will be extended to also cover all IPA groupings.

Q => [+uvular ] and not [+consonantal +velar +back]
L = [+liquid] and not [+consonantal +approximant] Liquid

All compound classes SHOULD be valid, but that won't be enforced through some feature geometry

valid = [+vowel +front]
invalid = [+plosive +front]

all classes

consonant
vowel
front
back
fricative
approximant
palatovelar
velar
liquid
nasal
sonorant
labial *
bilabial *
uvular
click
plosive
retroflex
voice
syllable
semivowel
continuant
affricate
laryngeal

* in the original ID P = Labial/Bilabial. Therefore all instances of P are [+labial,bilabial].

Contributing

Get involved! We're just getting started.

Say hello: https://github.com/quilde/indexdiachronica/discussions/22

discuss the latest release: https://github.com/quilde/indexdiachronica/discussions/23

Logo and Mascot

I like the logo, however it maybe isn't fully representative of the project (one could think it's only about egyptian stuff), so we might change it. I want to keep the owl though, so I decided to make it the mascot.

quilde / indexdiachronica

readme