EARS January 16, 2004 Meeting

There was agreement on the following specifications:

1.  MSAT (Green Transcription Area) should be a sufficient target. No need for a lot of markup. What is needed is a Quick Transcription with easy, intuitive use of underlying MSA-based forms only when they really exist.

2.  Auto-segmentation of conversation is acceptable. 

3.  No use of ‘shaddah’

4.  No vocalization is needed.

5.  Use all glottal stops when and where they occur

6.  Use of vocalic length and/or diphthongs when they occur. The connection between bi:r and bi?r will be made and entered in the lexicon

7. Use the closed set below for numbers from 11 to 19.  Tim Buckwalter searched

for and found enough convincing evidence for all the forms we are proposing to use:

إحدعشر	‘eleven’
إِثنعشر	‘twelve’
ثلاثطعشر	‘thirteen’
أربعطعشر	‘fourteen’
خمسطعشر	‘fifteen’
سطعشر	‘sixteen’
سبعطعشر	‘seventeen’
ثمانطعشر	‘eighteen’
تسعطعشر	‘nineteen’

8. Use the appended closed set for months and days of the week

9.  Standardize the spelling of person and location names and use systematic spacing to separate multiple forms:  e.g biyr ziyt; Eabd  Al~ah, etc.

10. Use the definite article Al- without a need to indicate assimilation.

11. No need to transcribe other assimilation phenomena which can be post-processed

12.  Use segmentation spaces to separate verbs from prepositional phrases:

            as in :  qult lik , lA bud~a; mA zAl, etc.

13.  Use initial of  b- to indicate futurity:

a.  /b-/ for the first person singular marker of the Imperfective Verb paradigm

b.  /by-/ for the third person masculine singular marker.

14.  Establish a closed list of all pronouns.

15.  Indicate all word variants as much as possible in a Word list (Lexicon)

16. No decision has been taken on stems. Tim Buckwalter will send out a draft of a working definition of stem identification. Our current position is not to mark stems.

17.  Use nunation diacritics when ‘tanwiyn’occurs.