Field Linguist's Toolbox | Hacker News Reader

Field Linguist's Toolbox

software.sil.org

38 pointsTomte7 comments

Horrible horrible software, we’ve been struggling with it for years… and yet, without viable alternatives.

Speaking of horrible software people have been struggling with for years with no viable alternative, is Praat still a thing?

Yes, but there are now python interfaces to it which make it so you can script in a more conventional language.

Very much a thing :) I am not a phonologist or phonetician, so I never really worked with it directly (aside a class at a summer school a decade ago), but some of my colleagues use it daily and they seem happy. No idea.

Do you have a list of complaints? I'm interested.

From the top of my head:

1. Gloss alignment in the file format is governed by magic (is it driven by the unicode display width? Is it UTF8 encoding size in bytes? Is it both?)

2. The file header has this magical number in it that just has to be the right one, otherwise you get weird glitches in the UI (like the file can't be edited). We get these regularly once per week when working with version control — the magic number seems to change randomly with no explanation

3. Does not work well for large teams due to shared dictionary. We have a decent git workflow in the meantime, but it's not easy.

4. Complicated project setup, especially if you want to share things. Not version control friendly — too many config files, too much system-specific stuff in them.

5. No native macOS version. This is a big one. We got it running under Wine on the new ARM Macs but I feel like it's a ticking bomb. It's fine for field people who will use a cheap disposable Windows laptop anyway, but not ok at all for people doing research on these corpora.

Overall, Toolbox was a great tool when it was first released, but a lot of time has passed and Toolbox did not keep moving. Unfortunately, newer tools (such as FieldWorks) made things more complicated without really improving anything. Toolbox's selling point is still its simplicity — at least we can parse the files with our analysis tools.

One reason for the complexity in Fieldworks Language Explorer (FLEx) is that language is complex, and FLEx is designed to handle all of the lexical and morphological complexity (reasonably) well. Toolbox, OTOH, has a minimalist structure, which means that whatever complexity you have, you'll have to figure out how to deal with.

Another reason for complexity in FLEx is that it tries to prevent you from shooting yourself in the foot--e.g. by by inconsistent spelling or inconsistent use of fields.

FLEx does not however try to cover all possible dictionaries, e.g. its ability to work with dialectal variation is not its strong point.

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