DanielGall500/dagbani-phonological-parser

Convert Dagbani, a Gur language spoken primarily in Ghana, into structured phonological representations. # Dagbani Phonological Parser ## Analyse the Moraic Structure of Dagbani Dagbani is a Gur language spoken in Ghana and to a lesser extent in Togo with an estimate of about 1M native speakers. This repository contains tools and scripts developed in the Rust programming language for the computational analysis of Dagbani phonology, specifically focused on vowel Advanced Tongue Root (ATR) properties and moraic structure. These tools were designed to help researchers verify phonological theories in under-studied languages by analyzing larger datasets. Advanced Tongue Root (ATR) is a feature of some languages that affects how vowels are pronounced. It refers to whether the root of the tongue moves forward (advanced) or stays back in the throat when making a vowel sound. - **[+ATR] vowels**: The tongue moves slightly forward, making the vowels sound "tenser" or more open (like "e" or "i"). - **[–ATR] vowels**: The tongue stays back, making the vowels sound "laxer" or more closed (like "a" or "ɛ"). This distinction helps create different vowel sounds and affects how words are pronounced in certain languages. #### What is included? * A dataset of 50 IPA transcriptions for verb roots. * Scripts for Pre-processing of IPA transcriptions. * Scripts for conversion to Consonant-Vowel structure. * Scripts for conversion from Consonant-Vowel structure to moraic structure. ## Research Overview In recent years, computational methods have become essential for the analysis of linguistic data. This project provides open-source tools for researchers to explore Dagbani phonological patterns, particularly for investigating the occurrence of ATR vowels in varying moraic structures. The primary tools developed for this project include: 1. **Dagbani pre-processing scripts** – To handle Dagbani text data, including IPA symbols. 2. **Phonological word to CV-structure converter** – A script that parses phonological words into their consonant-vowel (CV) structure. 3. **CV-structure to mor …