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Aboriginal Languages of Australia - Bayala Database - supplementary views

8.2 SUPPLEMENTARIES (2)

 

 
8.2 ADDITIONAL DATA

Another group of fields provide additional data.

  •  Scientific name (shades of blue)

Where a scientific name is known it is entered in the ‘scientific name’ field. 

Sometimes another version of the scientific name has been provided, sometimes being an earlier version of the scientific name; and as this occurred a sufficient number of times, a ‘scientific name alternative’ field was introduced.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Fig. 8.2.1 Additional data fields in Layout and standard views

 

 

  •  Informant (pink)

When an informant’s name is known, or guessed at, it is entered into the ‘informant’ field.

  •  Function (lilac)

Any kind of note about the function nature of a particular entry might be entered here. Such as REDUP (reduplication), when a word is a double (e.g. wara wara), or RECIP (reciprocal), or even PN Fr 2sgNOM  (free pronoun second singular nominative), in the case of an entry representing ‘thou’, and so on.

  •  Part of speech (pastel purple)

Noun, verb adjective and so on are entered into the ‘part of speech’ field.

 

 

 

 

HANDY FIELDS ABOVE THE INFORMATION BARS

In the narrow space above the information bars there is room for three fields

Aboriginal Languages of Australia - Bayala Database - handy fields

Fig. 8.2.2 The three handy fields: searcher, character set, and second transcription rule

 

 

 

These are:

1. the ALLSYD SEARCHER JSM field, described earlier;

2. Mac cht: this is a collection of unicode characters (appearing from a ‘Mac cht sets’ related database) any one character of which can be copied and  used to replace a special character used in the original record. Here is the group of characters for the ALLSYD database:

Aboriginal Languages of Australia - Bayala Database - unicode characters

Fig. 8.2.3 Unicode characters not available on a standard keyboard

 

Any characters found to be useful can be put in this bar. On a Macintosh these characters are obtained from the Character Viewer, a basic Macintosh resource...

Aboriginal Languages of Australia - Bayala Database - character views

Fig. 8.2.4

It is accessed by means of an icon in the menu bar at the top right of the desktop; clicking on ‘Show character viewer’ produces an extensive list, from which the few in the ‘Mac cht’ field have been selected.

This icon is made to appear in the menu bar from the System preferences panel, and its ‘Language & Text’ entity:

Aboriginal Languages of Australia - Bayala Database - supplementary views

Fig. 8.2.5 Macintosh System Preferences ‘Language & Text’ entity

 

and ticking the ‘Keyboard & Character Viewer’ checkbox.

 

 

3. ‘::rule 1’ refers to a transcription rule. An entry automatically appears here when the second column Transcription indicator is used, as below:

Aboriginal Languages of Australia - Bayala Database - supplementary views

Fig. 8.2.6 The second transcription indicator column in use. The explanation for the first column appear above in the charcoal bar. The explanation for the second column appears above the information bars, where there was room to place it.

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