Linguistic Survey of India and Polyglotta Africana: Two Retrostandardized Digital Editions of Large Historical Collections of Multilingual Wordlists

Abstract

The Linguistic Survey of India (LSI) and the Polyglotta Africana (PA) are two of the largest historical collections of multilingual wordlists. While the originally printed editions have long since been digitized and shared in various forms, no editions in which the original data is presented in standardized form, comparable with contemporary wordlist collections, have been produced so far. Here we present digital retro-standardized editions of both sources. For maximal interoperability with datasets such as Lexibank the two datasets have been converted to CLDF, the standard proposed by the Cross-Linguistic Data Formats initiative. In this way, an unambiguous identification of the three main constituents of wordlist data – language, concept and segments used for transcription – is ensured through links to the respective reference catalogs, Glottolog, Concepticon and CLTS. At this level of interoperability, legacy material such as LSI and PA may provide a reasonable complementary source for language documentation, filling in gaps where original documentation is not possible anymore.