Highlighting the Sound Shift in Punjabi Language: A Corpus-Based Descriptive Study

Punjabi language is most widely spoken language of Pakistan (Abbas, Chohan, Ahmed, & Kaleem, 2016). Punjabi is under developed language because of which, upcoming generations are shifting to other technically and digitally developed languages such as Urdu and English. In result of which, the sound shift is being observed in Punjabi language. Sounds which used to be present in the past in Punjabi language are found missing now. This leads to a problematic situation that this sound shift may result in language extinction and sound loss. This study is about the sound change and it has been studied in Punjabi language. On the basis of observation of speech in surrounding, researcher made a hypothesis that those speakers of Punjabi language who acquired Punjabi as L1 are able to produce few distinctive sounds that are not produced by the speakers who acquired Urdu as a mother tongue. For this purpose, a corpus of 2 million words was collected and the words including the sounds |n|ن  and |l| ل were particularly shortlisted from the corpus. The speakers from both origins were asked to pronounce these words, the hypothesis was proved and, in result, variations in the pronunciation of sounds were observed. Sociolinguists and Phonologists need to heed on this issue to save Punjabi language from extinction

Text Summarization Technique for Punjabi Language Using Neural Networks

In the contemporary world, utilization of digital content has risen exponentially. For example, newspaper and web articles, status updates, advertisements etc. have become an integral part of our daily routine. Thus, there is a need to build an automated system to summarize such large documents of text in order to save time and effort. Although, there are summarizers for languages such as English since the work has started in the 1950s and at present has led it up to a matured stage but there are several languages that still need special attention such as Punjabi language. The Punjabi language is highly rich in morphological structure as compared to English and other foreign languages. In this work, we provide three phase extractive summarization methodology using neural networks. It induces compendious summary of Punjabi single text document. The methodology incorporates pre-processing phase that cleans the text; processing phase that extracts statistical and linguistic features; and classification phase. The classification based neural network applies an activation function- sigmoid and weighted error reduction-gradient descent optimization to generate the resultant output summary. The proposed summarization system is applied over monolingual Punjabi text corpus from Indian languages corpora initiative phase-II. The precision, recall and F-measure are achieved as 90.0%, 89.28% an 89.65% respectively which is reasonably good in comparison to the performance of other existing Indian languages" summarizers.This research is partially funded by the Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness, Spain (CSO2017-86747-R)

Highlighting the Sound Shift in Punjabi Language: A Corpus-Based Descriptive Study

Punjabi language is most widely spoken language of Pakistan (Abbas, Chohan, Ahmed, & Kaleem, 2016). Punjabi is under developed language because of which, upcoming generations are shifting to other technically and digitally developed languages such as Urdu and English. In result of which, the sound shift is being observed in Punjabi language. Sounds which used to be present in the past in Punjabi language are found missing now. This leads to a problematic situation that this sound shift may result in language extinction and sound loss. This study is about the sound change and it has been studied in Punjabi language. On the basis of observation of speech in surrounding, researcher made a hypothesis that those speakers of Punjabi language who acquired Punjabi as L1 are able to produce few distinctive sounds that are not produced by the speakers who acquired Urdu as a mother tongue. For this purpose, a corpus of 2 million words was collected and the words including the sounds |n|ن and |l| ل were particularly shortlisted from the corpus. The speakers from both origins were asked to pronounce these words, the hypothesis was proved and, in result, variations in the pronunciation of sounds were observed. Sociolinguists and Phonologists need to heed on this issue to save Punjabi language from extinction

Gurmukhi printing types: an historical analysis of British design, development, and distribution in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

This thesis focuses on the role of British entities involved in the founding and development of printing in the Gurmukhi script, from the inception of printing in this writing system with movable type in 1800, until the beginnings of the digital era in the twentieth century. It traces the material production of Gurmukhi printing types under the changing technologies during this time frame and considers the impacts of various technological limitations on the appearance of the script when printed. Furthermore, it identifies the intent and objectives of those producing founts in a script foreign to them, and considers their approaches for overcoming various cultural, social, and economic obstacles, to determine how successful they were in realising their aims for printing in this writing system. Finally, it presents a comparative analysis of the founts developed during this period to highlight key typographic developments in the printing of Gurmukhi by the individuals and companies under consideration, and determines significant design decisions that influenced and informed subsequent developments. The research draws on largely unexplored primary resources housed in various archives across Britain, that provide a window into the practises and networks for the British type founders under consideration, shedding light on the establishment, organisation, and development of these actors’ operations, the modus operandi, and the networks that enabled and sustained it. This work aims to document a substantial gap in the history of Gurmukhi typographic development and printing, and serve as a contribution to the interrelated fields of typography, printing history, and culture alike