There seems to be an increasing interest in collaborating with me on Eldamo data, which means I've needed to fix a major flaw in how Eldamo identifies its entries. Previously, Eldamo identified word entries only through the language and word itself in the raw XML data:
Eldamo also has a "page-id", but originally that ID was always derived from the word and was not fixed in value. For example, not long ago I changed ᴹQ. má “hand” to ᴹQ. má¹ “hand” because a distinct word was publish in PE21: ᴹQ. má² “land, region”. This meant that the page-id for ᴹQ. má “hand” changed at that time (about a year ago).
This is no longer true. I've modified the Eldamo logic so that page-id is immutable, and won't change if the word value changes. This should make collaboration easier, because you can link to Eldamo data using the fixed and immutable page-id instead of the word value itself (which might change for typo corrections or because new and similar words are published).
This is how the internationalized data I mentioned in my previous post works: it uses the immutable page-id to link the non-English translations to the associated entry in Eldamo. This way, as I edit Eldamo, the non-English translations will remained linked even if the word changes in small ways.
This is not to say a page-id will always exist. Sometimes I discover entries in Eldamo that I now think are bogus, and delete them, and their associated page-id also disappears. But if I modify rather than delete an entry, the page-id will stay fixed.
Lokyt L. Jul 11, 2018 (11:54)
You list G. gwalir "a rime" (https://eldamo.org/content/words/word-2014687261.html) together with its synonym gwaidhi as a derivation of ᴱ√GʷIÐ.
However, gwalir is IMHO clearly a combination of the collective prefix *ŋwa- (https://eldamo.org/content/words/word-3499830491.html) and ᴱ√LIÐ (https://eldamo.org/content/words/word-2340811897.html), quite the same as golairin (https://eldamo.org/content/words/word-292998387.html). You even got it right with your ᴺS. adaptation (https://eldamo.org/content/words/word-3116099065.html) :-)
So gwalir doesn't belong with gwaidhi (and ᴱ√GʷIÐ) at all.
Paul Strack Jul 11, 2018 (15:55)
Lokyt L. Jul 16, 2018 (10:44)
I've noticed that some word variants, probably all from the set of those deleted by Tolkien at some time, still don't show in the Search. I found this out with some G. adverbs & adjectives, namely bodron (https://eldamo.org/content/words/word-3189058085.html, where it is furthermore wrongly placed with an adjective despite being explicitely marked as "av." in GL), egron (https://eldamo.org/content/words/word-3595745785.html) and fidron (https://eldamo.org/content/words/word-255498755.html), but it might very well be more widespread.
Is this intentional?
eldamo.org - Eldamo : Gnomish : bodra
Paul Strack Jul 17, 2018 (06:36)
Lokyt L. Jul 17, 2018 (07:42)
It makes some research procedures harder (as one cannot get a reliably complete list e.g. of all occurances of one particular suffix - which is what I was trying to do), but I gather things like this aren't the primary purpose of Eldamo anyway.
(However, in the particular case of GL, I'd say most of the deleted variants actually deserve a place amongst the indexed ones more than their later replacements. The former mostly belong to the main, most coherent and most systematically composed layer of the text, whereas the later changes were AFAIK only occasional and rather erratic - cf. PE 11/2-3.)
Anyway, I'd still like to point out bodron's not being an adjective.
Paul Strack Jul 17, 2018 (15:21)
Lokyt L. Jul 17, 2018 (16:30)
Damien Bador Jul 20, 2018 (06:45)
Damien Bador Jul 20, 2018 (06:49)
This feels like the wrong way to proceed, which will end up into a Neo-Elvish dictionary, and not a true dictionary of Tolkien's Elvish.
However, in this case again, a solution could be to have a tag for regularized orthographies, leaving readers to decide whether they want to search all forms, regularized forms only, or authentic forms only. The same could work for neologisms, by the way.
Paul Strack Jul 20, 2018 (07:21)
But those are really limitations of the search engine, not the data model itself. In theory you could parse the Eldamo data model into some other kind of engine and build the kind of searches you want. All the information is there in the raw XML model, including all the deleted forms and original spellings.
Most people don’t have the technical expertise to work with the raw XML, but one of things I’ve been considering is producing spreadsheet exports of Eldamo data for research purposes, since that pretty accessible for most people. I just don’t have clear requirements right now for it.
Damien Bador Jul 20, 2018 (09:41)
Damien Bador Jul 20, 2018 (10:36)