I am a computational linguistics student looking to do some
quantitative analysis on east asian scripts. I would like to include
Modern Yi in my study. I'm looking for any information on where I
could find documents (in electronic format) that are written in Yi
script.

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Request for Question Clarification by answerguru-ga on 17 Jun 2002 13:33 PDT

Hi there,

I've come across what seems like a great source for what you are
looking for, but since I wouldn't classify it as a "document" I'm not
going to post it as an answer.

Stevan Harrell, editor
Perspectives on the Yi of Southwest China:

http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/8497.html

The author claims that this is the only book in the last four decades
in Western language to be written on the Yi.

If this is what you are looking for I would appreciate your honesty..I
will then post it as an answer.

Cheers!
answerguru-ga

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Request for Question Clarification by justaskscott-ga on 23 Jun 2002 20:04 PDT

As dr_lap-ga explains in his comment, it is relatively unlikely that
there are online texts typed in Yi font.  However, I have found one
GIF and two JPEGs of texts in modern Yi, including one fairly lengthy
text.  Would you be interested in these as an answer?

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Clarification of Question by lowery-ga on 24 Jun 2002 08:48 PDT

Hi justaskscott,

   Well from my own email correspondance with other researchers both
unicode and latex support the Yi character set. I need to do
quantitative analysis (symbol counts etc) on the text so images are
tough to work with... if you come across any unicode/latex/postscript
texts or texts in other character encoding that is what i am looking
for. I belive electonic Yi texts (or any of the dialects ie Nousu)
must exist (somewhere) since there is support for the character set.

Thanks,
  -Travis

Hi Lowery,


   Good day. Yi was first believed to have existed years ago. The
oldest document is 500 years ago. After 1970, a popular proposal
introduced a "simplified" form of the Yi script. Taking 819 characters
from the Classic script, "Modern Yi" is simply a syllabary. The
original Yi script is called Classical Yi.

   The site http://www.ancientscripts.com/yi.html has a few Yi
characters, both Modern and Classical.

   A note regarding answerguru-ga's clarification, the book deals with
the Yi community and not the language.

Have a good day.

Cheers,
aditya2k

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Request for Answer Clarification by lowery-ga on 17 Jun 2002 14:01 PDT

You didn't answer my question, you answered the question "What is the
Yi language?" and I didn't ask that. Please cancel your answer. 

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Clarification of Answer by aditya2k-ga on 17 Jun 2002 14:14 PDT

There is no facility to cancel the answer.

The questioner has to ask for a refund. You could've asked for a
clarification before rating the answer, so that I could spend more
time and search more resources.

I'm sorry, but I will not look into this question further.

In future, when you ask a question and get an answer, ask for a
clarification first, and then rate the answer poorly if you're not
satisfied with the answer.

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Request for Answer Clarification by lowery-ga on 17 Jun 2002 14:25 PDT

Dear aditya2k
Rather than me have to ask for clarification to an answer that is
answering a different question that asked, I would rather you not post
answers regarding questions you don't have knowledge about, anyone can
do a google keywords search, that is not what i'm paying for. The
service will be a lot more valueable that way. I'm looking for someone
who knows whether a modern Yi corpus exists in electronic form.
Thank-you.

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Request for Answer Clarification by lowery-ga on 17 Jun 2002 14:26 PDT

Needless to say I will be asking for this to be reposted :)

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Clarification of Answer by aditya2k-ga on 17 Jun 2002 15:05 PDT

Hi lowery,


   My apologies for misunderstanding your question. You wanted
documents in that script. I thought you wanted some characters in that
script.

Have a good day,

Aditya2k

I am inquiring about the existance of a Modern Yi electronic corpus
(of text). I did not ask what Modern Yi was. The answer that was given
did not answer the question I asked. Please repost. Thank-you.

I didn't ask what Yi was, Daniels and Bright have an excellent
introduction, I am inquiring about the existance of an electronic
corpus of Yi text.

Follow the technology: The Yi syllables and radicals were not
incorporated into UCS/Unicode (modern font standard) until version 3.0
in 2000 (Note: the Yiddish language font was initially abbreviated to
"Yi," so earlier references are to Yiddish). Currently there does not
appear to be a text editor for Yi. Thus the only means of inputing Yi
is through a general Unicode text editor (search: unicode text editor
your_operating_system_here). A better means of viewing Yi text is
through freeware from the SIL language site (Windows 95/98 NT):
http://www.sil.org/computing/fonts/silyi/feat.htm

This recent adoption of the Yi font and lack of a real text editor
mean no significant body of online texts currently exists. As I'm sure
you're aware, in contrast, Mandarin has more than a decade of text
editor development and the option to input characters either
phonetically on a standard keyboard through Wade-Giles, pinyin, etc.
or through a specialized Chinese keyboard. The need for developing
electronic text corpus resources for minority languages is highlighted
by McEnrey et al. in "Corpus resources and minority language
engineering" (2000):
http://www.emille.lancs.ac.uk/reports/lrec2000.pdf . As you can see,
requesting electronic Yi texts was not even an option at this time
because it was before the adoption of the Yi font in Unicode 3.0.

The best collection of non-english text resources is through SIL:
http://www.sil.org/linguistics/ETEXT.HTML#texts
The best collection for corpus linguistics is maintained by Michael
Barlow at Rice:
http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~barlow/corpus.html

Possible contacts for further information:
SIL International linguistics section "focuses on researching
undocumented minority languages, training field linguists, and
providing resources to assist in linguistic data collection and
analysis": http://www.sil.org/linguistics
EMILLE (Enabling Minority Language Engineering) "is a 3 year EPSRC
project at Lancaster University and Sheffield University, designed to
build a 63 million word electronic corpus of South Asian languages,
especially those spoken in the UK." Although they focus on India and
are not covering the Yi language, they might be aware of electronic
text compilation in SE Asia: http://www.emille.lancs.ac.uk/
Julian Wheatley at MIT has done extensive linguistic research in the
modern Yi language and might be aware of electronic resources:
wheatley@mit.edu

Although not the outcome you were hoping for, I hope you find this
information helpful.