Scription v0.5.0

v0.5.0 of the Scription format has been released! Check it out on the releases page.

What is the Scription text format?

The Scription text format is a set of guidelines for formatting interlinear glossed texts in a way that programming languages can easily parse, but that is still easy for humans to type and read. At its simplest, a scription file is just a basic interlinear gloss. Below is a valid scription file containing a single utterance in Chitimacha:

waxdungu qasi
waxt-qungu qasi
day-one    man
one day a man

View the entire specification for the Scription text format here.

Release Notes

This release contains several breaking changes and several minor changes:

• 4-line utterances now default to transcription + morphemic analysis + glosses + translation
• adds a new word transcription line (\w) containing phonemic transcriptions of each word in the utterance
• adds a new literal word translation line (\wlt) containing a literal translation of each word, using periods instead of spaces
• allows utterances to have a metadata line as the first line, beginning with a hash (#); useful for indicating the language of the utterance, or other information pertinent to that utterance or example
• if a word has two morphemes with the same gloss, those two morphemes are now treated as a discontinuous morpheme
• if either the morphemic analysis line (\m) or glosses line (\gl) is present, the other must now be present as well
• non-breaking hyphens are now treated as word characters
• note lines (\n) now follow the same convention for identifying their language as other lines (a hyphen followed by a language tag)
• clarify that glossing infixes is supported, using the Leipzig convention of angle brackets <>.