Latham 1862
This corpus contains the Formosan lexical data from Robert Gordon Latham's 1862 Elements of Comparative Philology (printed pp. 315–318), a nineteenth-century comparative wordlist. It comprises 45 lexical entries across two historically attested Formosan languages — Siraya (fos) and Babuza-Favorlang (bzg) — each paired with an English gloss. A third column in the printed tables, headed "Sida", is transcribed but not published; see Notes and Issues. Because the source scan has no text layer, the table was transcribed by hand from the page renders and independently checked against the source. The historical spelling is preserved as-is; no modern orthographic standard or phonology exists for these varieties, so none is inferred.
Corpus Statistics
Babuza-Favorlang Favorlang
Siraya
Word count
31
16
Total audio
0
0
Transcribed
0
0
Untranscribed
0
0
Translated words
English
31
16
Mandarin
0
0
Japanese
0
0
Dutch
0
0
Morphologically segmented
0
0
Glossed words
0
0
Corpus Processing
The hand transcription lives in a reviewed, page-addressed source ledger (CodeAndDocs/source_ledger.tsv), from which CodeAndDocs/build_lexical_xml.py rebuilds the XML; every emitted field is independently verified against the ledger. The entry point is CodeAndDocs/generate_xml.sh, which builds from the ledger and then runs the shared clean_xml.py (a verified no-op — the transcription is already clean).
Each published source cell becomes one lexical S record. Where a cell gives two readings, the ledger's reading_type column decides how they are represented: two competing lexemes become two S records, the second taking the first's id plus -opt, while two spellings of one word stay in a single record as an original FORM plus a FORM ver="alt". Latham's historical diacritics (â á ó é à) are preserved exactly.
There is no standard tier and no PHON tier, by design. Neither variety has an approved standard orthography — standards.csv leaves both blank — so there is nothing to transliterate into and nothing to compare an orthography profile against; no orthography check is run for them at all. Query the original FORM.
Notes and Issues
The Gabelentz "Sida" column is not published. Latham's tables on printed pp. 316–318 carry a third Formosan column headed "Sida". Publishing it as Siraya would assert that Sida is the "Sideia" of the Klaproth/Vander Vlis table on p. 315, and FormosanBank does not make that identification. Its 24 cells are transcribed in the source ledger and marked excluded, so the decision is reversible without redoing the work, but no S record is emitted for them and 22 previously published records were withdrawn.
The two Sideia readings are published as pronunciation variation within Siraya, not as distinct dialects. Where Klaproth and Vander Vlis give different readings of the same entry, the second is a FORM ver="alt" on the same record. Latham's presentation suggests these may be two dialects; the corpus records that here rather than encoding it.
The file name says more than the file contains. The Siraya file is latham_1862_sideia_sida.xml and its TEXT id is latham_1862_sideia_sida, from when the Sida column was published in it. Published identifiers are never renamed, so both keep the old name.
Historical spellings have no approved standardization or pronunciation profile; query the original FORM. English headings are lexical glosses, not sentence translations. This written source supplies no audio.
Access Details
The repo containing this corpus in FormosanBank as well as the code to reconstruct the corpus can be found here.
Copyright
public domain. The source, Latham (1862), is in the public domain.
Citation
In accordance with our Terms of Use, if you use this corpus or any product derived from this corpus in any publication, you must cite both FormosanBank and:
Latham, R. G. (1862). Elements of comparative philology. London: Walton and Maberly.
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