Comparing languages with Cog

Researching what languages speech communities use and when is an important step in determining how any Bible translation project might proceed. When researching several speech varieties in an area it can be helpful to elicit word lists from speakers in order to gauge how similar the varieties are.

Analyze and Compare Word Lists with Cog

Import your files into Cog

If you have word lists from two or more speech varieties, you can input these into Cog. The easiest way to do this is probably through a .tsv or .csv file, which can be exported from a spreadsheet, although Cog also accepts WordSurv files.

You can then navigate to the Compare and Analyze tabs to see the phonetic data compared between the various varieties. For example, you can see likely cognates, and sound changes between those cognates throughout the word list.

Cog has the ability to compare and analyze word lists from any number of language varieties, helping you to understand the phonetic and lexical relationships between them.

What opportunities exist for advanced technology?

As speech recognition technology becomes more advanced, this technology could analyze audio recordings and identify the languages spoken. Community members could contribute recordings, which are then transcribed phonetically and analyzed phonologically, to facilitate orthography development.