Sound Comparisons

Exploring Diversity in Phonetics across Language Families

Welcome to Sound Comparisons, a website structure for exploring diversity in phonetics across language families from around the world.

We already cover hundreds of regional languages, dialects and accents across various language families:

• in Europe: the Romance, Germanic, Balto-Slavic and Celtic families, and accents of English
• in the Andes: the Quechua, Aymara, Uru and Mapudungun families
• in Vanuatu: the Austronesian languages of Malakula island, the ‘Galapagos of language evolution’

Just hover the mouse over any map or table view to hear instantaneously the different pronunciations of the same 100-250 words [‘cognate’] across that family, recorded in our fieldwork campaigns.

These databases serve as input to linguistic research to measure how phonetic divergence arose through the histories of these language families (see Heggarty et al. 2010).

Our website offers powerful tools for linguist researchers (to search and filter the database, download all detailed phonetic transcriptions and sound files, create citable links, etc.), but is also multilingual and user-friendly for the general public who actually speak all of these languages, many of them endangered.

Requirements:

php-fpm installed via apt, see https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-install-linux-nginx-mysql-php-lemp-stack-in-ubuntu-16-04#step-3-install-php-for-processing

Setup instructions:

• Sound files must be placed in site/sound.
• Configuration is done via environment variables. These can be set in /etc/php/7.0/fpm/pool.d/www.conf:

env[DEPLOYED] = 'true'
env[MYSQL_SERVER] = 'localhost'
env[MYSQL_USER] = 'soundcomparisons'
env[MYSQL_PASSWORD] = '…'
env[MYSQL_DATABASE] = 'v4'

• A soundcomparisons user was created to run the systemd scripts as:

useradd -M soundcomparisons  # -M: no homedirectory created
usermod -L soundcomparisons  # -L: no login allowed for user
chown -R soundcomparisons.soundcomparisons /srv/soundcomparisons

Offline version:

To export an offline copy of the Sound-Comparisons website follow these steps:

• If you need to generate the map tiles and cannot reuse ones from a previous export: Use docker together with the mapnik/run.sh script to start a local mapnik tileserver for the export.

• Make sure you have a local copy of php installed as the export script is written in it.

• Navigate to the script/ directory and execute the generateOffline.php script. Call it with an EXPORT_TASK environment variable like one of these calls:

  env EXPORT_TASK=data php -f generateOffline.php
  env EXPORT_TASK=map php -f generateOffline.php
  env EXPORT_TASK=all php -f generateOffline.php

  If the EXPORT_TASK is set to all or map, the map tiles will be generated.

• After the script executed you should have a directory named similar to sndComp_2017-01-31_export in the Sound-Comparisons repository a level above the script directory.

• You'll need to copy the sound directory into this export folder for the sound files to work. For deployment it isn't strictly necessary to bundle the export directory with the map tiles and the sound files if your users are clever enough to copy the files into the locations themselfs. This may reduce the storage space required by the export. Also note that it may be helful to compress the export because some file systems don't perform well when copying many small files.