papuan languagesWith the number of languages expected to go extinct in the coming
century, language documentation as a priority is gaining increasing
support. We discuss an experimental method for augmenting the
number and scope of available language descriptions. Unlike traditional
language descriptions, this work is largely based on translations
of Bible verses with the accompanying English text used as a guide
to the underlying semantics. Methodologically, our work sits at the
intersection of three different approaches to language and linguistics:
Classics studies of undeciphered languages, traditional field methods,
and corpus linguistics.
We further motivate this methodology and discuss related work in
section 1. Section 2 describes some of the language-general challenges
posed, both practical and philosophical. Section 3 covers the
traditional methodologies from which we extended our work. Section
4 includes short examples from four languages spoken in Papua New
Guinea: Folopa, Mufian, Suki, and Urim. In the final section, we
sketch several directions for future work.published or submitted for publicationis peer reviewe
