Welcome to the Iyasa Webonary. Iyasa (also known as "Yasa" or "Iyassa") is a Cameroonian Bantu language (A32a). Here I assemble basic lexical data from the language, with the goal of contributing to several larger objectives at once: first, to provide the Iyasa community with a reference document for use in the development of a standardized orthography as well as an indigenous written literature, second, to document a part of the vocabulary of a language that, according to some, might be endangered, and third, to present the linguistic community at large with a richly detailed database supported by primary linguistic data (i.e. audio recordings), that will hopefully contribute both to the improvement of our understanding of African languages and linguistic typology and to the encounter between linguistic theory and a language that, up to now, has been little described.
In light of the sometimes divergent objectives and needs of these different target users, I've opted to present the data in two different formats: a
Dictionary View and a
Database View.
The
Dictionary View displays lexical entries in a way familiar from traditional dictionaries, sorted either by lexeme or by stem, and complete with phonological form, pronunciation, meaning(s), etc. Because Iyasa still lacks a standardized and generally recognized writing system, the primary written representation for this project remains for the moment the phonemic form. Orthographic representations will be added when the writing system question has been resolved by the community.
The
Database View, by contrast, presents lexical data in the form of a very large table, sortable according to all the relevant data fields of each entry. It is designed primarily for linguists and other researchers who need more control over the sorting of lexical information. It is much less readable than the
Dictionary View, and because each page contains the entirety of the database, it requires much more time to download and display. In addition, each new sort command actually requires the loading of a new and unusually large HTML page, and the user must therefore wait each time the database is sorted by a new criterion. For these reasons, I only recommend the
Database View to researchers with a real need for tight control over the sorting of several different fields. The needs of more casual users will be satisfied by the
Dictionary View in the majority of cases.
