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General Information

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What is the goal of collecting language information for FirstVoices?

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In order to understand the advanced categories of verbs, we need to understand a little bit about nouns and verbs and their jobs in sentences. While verbs describe the main action of the sentence, nouns can do a couple different things: they can be a subject or an object. Example:

Subjects are the nouns that are doing the action in the sentence.

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Verbs: Getting all of the information that you need

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Verbs (action words) are the most important part of most languages and this is especially true when it comes to Indigenous languages spoken in B.C. Whenever you elicit any verb, you should try to get as many forms of the verb as you can.

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Present tense paradigm for “to dance”

If you are not sure whether your language has these forms, ask us. If your language doesn’t have them, cross these rows out.

Make sure that you and the speaker you are working with clearly understand what you are eliciting or else you can get into a “who’s on first, what’s on second” situation! For example, if you ask a speaker how to say that you want the form for “you are dancing” they might think you are asking them to say “I am dancing”.

So, at the very least, it would be awesome to elicit at least 6 forms for every verb, the present tense paradigm. It would be even better if you could get the paradigms for past tense and future tense. These are below.

Past tense paradigm of “to dance”

Future tense paradigm of “to dance”

There are many more kinds of paradigms you could work on collecting, especially paradigms having to do with aspect (see above), but this is a good start for now.

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In addition to the grammatical categories discussed in section 4, it is also useful to tag words in FirstVoices with categories that describe the meaning that a word has. For example, if you enter the word for dog, you will want to tag it with the categories “Animal” and “Mammal”. Below are examples of potential categories. Language Administrators can add custom categories to your FirstVoices language site. More information on how to do that can be found here: /wiki/spaces/FIR1/pages/1705993

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^{Version: October 2018}