CLUL_site

Description:

 This project aims at making available, online, all the data collected for the Atlas Lingüístico de la Península Ibérica (ALPI), most of which have not yet been published.

 The ALPI was designed by Ramón Menéndez Pidal and directed by Tomás Navarro Tomás. Its beginning took place in the early 1930’s of the past century. The linguistic questionnaire includes two sections: one, with about 400 questions, dedicated to the phonetic, morphological and syntactic aspects; the other, with about 800 questions concerning the lexicon.

 The main part of the ALPI linguistic surveys was made until 1935, when the field work came to a halt due to the Spanish Civil War and World War 2. From 1947 until 1954, the remaining ones were explored.

 The ALPI’s network points are distributed in the following Iberian Romance linguistic domains: Galicia 53, Portugal 93, Asturias, Leon and Extremadura 78, Castilian regions and Albacete 90, Andalucía and Murcia 71, Navarra and Aragón 40, Andorra, Roussilon, Cataluña, Valencia and Baleares 104.

 In Portugal, the enquiries were made in two distinct periods: in 1936, by Armando Nobre de Gusmão and Aníbal Otero; and in 1953-54, by Luís F. Lindley Cintra and Aníbal Otero.

 Otero was responsible for the phonetic questionnaire and Nobre de Gusmão and Lindley Cintra for the lexical one.

 Lindley Cintra, based on the information that he gathered for the ALPI, had developed the most of his research in Dialectology and Linguistic Geography; indeed many of his descriptions continue being actual for several aspects of the Portuguese dialectology, namely his proposal for the classification of the Portuguese dialects.

 In 1962 was published the only volume of this project that included 70 phonetic maps. After that, the publication of the future projected volumes was interrupted.

 Due to the fact that, until now, there is no peninsular linguistic atlas, the ALPI’s data are essential for the comparative study of Iberian-Romance dialects. For that very reason, their value is unquestionable. At the same time, since the fifties of the last century, the linguistic situation in all Iberian linguistic domains has suffered a very fast evolution. That’s why these data have, also, a true documental value of great historical interest.

 Computational technology provides a large number of resources in what concerns the accomplishment of different geolinguistic tasks, either in database building, and either in automatic cartography. This fact will make available a true access of the data to all the scientific community.

 To attain these purposes, the following tasks are fixed: 

• the settlement of a correspondence table between the phonetic symbols used in the original transcriptions and those, from the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), in what they will be converted. This fact, the use of a wide transcription instead of a narrow one, will simplify and will facilitate the net researches; however, the users will be able to access to the original manuscript transcriptions; 
• the digitalization of all the original enquiry questionnaires: all the material is manuscript. 
• the building of a relational database where all the content of each enquiry will be introduced; 
• the recovering of the material with ethnographic interest (drawings, oral literature, etc.);
• the final revision of all introduced data.

 The project’s expected duration is of four and an half years.