THE CICIPU LANGUAGE
Dictionary
This online dictionary is really just a wordlist with some photographs. About half of the 2000 or so entries were elicited using the SIL Comparative African 1700-item wordlist, and the remainder came to light during the transcription of about six hours of text.There are quite a few pictures in the dictionary (thanks to Roger Blench and Markus Yabani who took some of them), which was created using two freely available programs: Toolbox which was used for data collection in the field, and secondly Lexique Pro which was used to convert the Toolbox database to HTML. Getting the images to display required some coaxing of the software! I used a workaround suggested by Nick Thieberger.
Before opening Lexique Pro I edited my Toolbox Dictionary to remove the brackets from my
\lc field. Because Cicipu is a noun class language it
makes sense to have separate fields for the lexeme (e.g. \lx bárá) and the citation form (e.g. \lc (kà)-bárá).
Unfortunately I could not get LexiquePro to sort on \lc whilst ignoring
the brackets, even though it gives you the option to do this. Therefore
I removed all the brackets from the \lc field (and also the \cf field, which of course must match the \lc field). The
following regular expression will do this (I used EditPad Pro -
the replacement syntax might be different for other RegEx programs).Search expression:
\\lc \((.*)\)-(.*)Replacement expression:
\\lc \1\2I also used a regular expression to append copy the contents of each
\pc (picture) field to a new \lf
(lexical function) field. I chose that field because I am not using it
for anything else, it comes near the bottom of the entry, and it is one
of the fields that LexiquePro exports.Search expression:
\\pc (.*)Replacement expression:
\\pc \1\r\n\\lf \1Finally, after using LexiquePro to export the dictionary to a webpage, I used the following expression to convert the 'lf' entries into images (of course, you'd have to replace the folder names with the correct ones for your setup)ː
Search expression:
<span
class="lpMiniHeading">\.\.\\\.\.\\image\\items\\([0-9a-zA-Z]*)\.jpg: </span><span
class="lpPunctuation">\.</span>Replacement expression:
<br/><a
target="_blank" href="../dictionary/images/\1.jpg"><img
src="../dictionary/images/\1_small.jpg"></a><br/>
A smaller version of the image appears in the dictionary, which you then click if you want to see the full version. I had to resize and copy all the images into the appropriate place on the web server (IrfanView makes this very easy to do).
By the way, regular expressions seemed very daunting at first but it was surprising easy to learn how to do this. I recommend getting EditPad Pro on a trial basis and having a look at Regular Expressions.info for the tutorials.