Wakhi Language Development

Changing the baseline writing sytem of a text in Language Explorer

One quirk of Language Explorer is that the baseline writing system of a text constrains how you do morphosyntactic analysis. If you begin with an orthographic transcription, you are obliged to do your morphology on orthography. But I want to do this:

1. Begin with an orthographic text in Language Explorer.
2. Gloss and transcribe this text.
3. Do morphosyntactic analysis on the phonetic transcription.

The way to get around the restriction is to export the transcribed text as a .flextext file, strip out every writing system but the phonetic one, and then import the text into Language Explorer.

This command simply removes everything from the .flextext file that isn't the IPA transcription fields (here called wbl-Qaaa-AF-fonipa-x-Zipa). The resulting .flextext file, when imported into Language Explorer, will have the IPA writing system as a baseline.

What is more, Language Explorer will remember the associations between the orthography, the phonetic transcription, and the gloss. So, the original work is saved, in general. One important caveat here is that if there are words that have the same phonetic transcription, but different meanings, Language Explorer won't be able to tell which gloss to use. (It will guess. This also doesn't change if you leave the original glosses in the FlexText file; they seem to be ignored.)