Shilluk Lexicography With Audio Data

Abstract

This archive represents a resource on the lexicon of Shilluk, a Nilo-Saharan language spoken in South Sudan. It includes a table of 2530 lexicographic items, plus 10082 sound clips. The table is included in pdf and MS Word formats. For each entry, we present: (a) the entry form (different for each word class, as explained below); (b) the orthographic representation of the entry form; (c) the paradigm forms and/or example(s); and (d) a description of the meaning. This collection was built up from 2013 onwards. The majority of entries were added between 2015 and 2018, in the context of the project “A descriptive analysis of the Shilluk language”, funded by the Leverhulme Trust (RPG-2015-055). The main two methods through which the collection was built up are focused lexicography collection by semantic domain, whereby we would collect e.g. words relating to dwellings / fishing / etc., and text collection, whereby we would add entries as we came across new words in the course of the analysis of narrative text. We also added some words on the basis of two lexicographic studies on Shilluk: Heasty (1974) and Ayoker & Kur (2016). We estimate that we drew a few hundreds from each. Comparing the lexicography resource presented here with these two resources, our main contribution is detail, in that we present information on the phonological form and on the grammatical paradigm. In addition, the phonological representations are made accountable through the inclusion of sound clips. Included in a separate folder are the recordings for cattle terms, collected by Amy Martin as part of her Hons dissertation research project. These cattle terms are not included as entries in this document; they are listed in her dissertation (Martin 2018). Further details can be found at the beginning of the ShillukLexicography.docx/pdf. Amy Martin kindly agreed to release her data, namely the sound clips containing words relating to cattle, under the same Creative Commons Attribution licence as the rest of the data provided here.