CoCoON.

February 14, 2017 by 4 Comments

CoCoON (COllections de COrpus Oraux Numériques) is a platform for oral resources; it’s got Atlas Linguistique des Côtes de l’Atlantique et de la Manche, Atlas linguistique d’Haïti, AuCo: corpus audio de langues du Vietnam et des pays voisins, lots of good stuff. I got the link through the good offices of the ever-alert bulbul, who says “I discovered it only yesterday and got a total kick out of the collection of texts in Slavomolisano (e.g. Bonifacio en Amérique, NB the final sentence).” Slavomolisano, to someone who knows a different Slavic language, sounds both weird and familiar. Enjoy!

Comments

  1. John Cowan says
    February 14, 2017 at 10:24 pm

    That reminds me that I recently read a short paper giving a first account of Kholosi, a language spoken in two villages inland from the Strait of Hormuz in Iran. The villagers claim that they were shipwrecked on the coast en route from India, and then moved north. Consequently, the paper is called “Shipwrecked and landlocked” — and sure enough, their language is Indic, though neither Romani nor Domari, and as such the westernmost non-migrant Indic language in the world.

  2. Lameen says
    February 15, 2017 at 4:19 am

    It would be remiss of me not to take the opportunity to plug my own lab’s collection, hosted on CoCoON: Pangloss. Highlights include Dumézil’s Ubykh recordings and notes from the last speaker.

  3. Lameen says
    February 15, 2017 at 5:01 am

    And that Kholosi paper is really neat – nice to know that even in a region as familiar as the Middle East it’s still possible to find new languages!

  4. David Marjanović says
    February 15, 2017 at 6:40 am

    Indeed. Here’s the last paragraph of the paper:

    To conclude, the present study is a modest contribution to the documentation of the languages of Iran. It has as its primary goal an initial presentation of the Kholosi language along with general observations on its structure and genetic affiliation. It also highlights the diversity of the language situation in Iran, and the incompleteness of the documentation that has taken place until now. If one language, distinct from all surrounding languages, has passed unnoticed by researchers over more than a century of linguistic description, how many more such languages might there be? And will these languages still be spoken by the time researchers arrive to document them, or will they have given way to the waves of Persian language which rise with each passing day?

Speak Your Mind

*