phonechars

phonechars is a Python library and command-line tool for extracting phonological phylogenetic characters from aligned lexical data, both for purposes of investigation into correspondence sets and phylogenetic analyses.

Installation

In any standard Python environment, phonechars can be installed with:

pip install phonechars

How to use

The library can be conveniently used by means of the phonechars command-line tool. While different options are available, a simple call to the program when provided the path to a wordlist of aligned data will generate three files with related information:

• A .chars.tsv file, extending the alignment information with correspondences inferred by means of different methods (currently, only a method modified from List (2019) and available via the lingrex library is offered)
• A .corrs.tsv file, informing the detected correspondences
• A .nex (NEXUS) file, suitable for analysis with standard phylogenetic tools including SplitsTree and BEAST2

A demo file, with information from Ryukyuian dialects as presented in Huisman (2022), is distributed with the standard installation and can be used for testing the command-line tool:

$ phonechars demo/ryukyu.tsv

Community guidelines

While the author can be contacted directly for support, it is recommended that third parties use GitHub standard features, such as issues and pull requests, to contribute, report problems, or seek support.

Contributing guidelines, including a code of conduct, can be found in the CONTRIBUTING.md file.

Author and citation

The library is developed by Tiago Tresoldi (tiago.tresoldi@lingfil.uu.se). The library is developed in the context of the Cultural Evolution of Texts project, with funding from the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (grant agreement ID: MXM19-1087:1).

If you use phonechars, please cite it as:

Tresoldi, Tiago, (2022). Phonechars: a Python library for extracting phonological phylogenetic characters. Version 0.1. Uppsala, University of Uppsala. https://github.com/tresoldi/phonechars

In BibTeX:

@misc{Tresoldi2022phonechars,
  url = {https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.03173},
  year = {2022},
  author = {Tiago Tresoldi},
  title = {Phonechars: a Python library for extracting phonological phylogenetic characters. Version 0.1},
  address = {Uppsala},
  publisher = {University of Uppsala}
}