initial literacy books. In the Fieldworks file and on the cards, reference the page and line number of all words from stories.
Figure 1. Example of a data card.
2.4.1 Cards
At least fifteen hundred cards slips of paper should be cut from A4 size blank paper 8 per page. On these write singular and plural forms of nouns if they differ directly below each other in the middle of
the card. An English gloss or simple definition goes below these words. Similarly for verbs, write two forms of the verb if given in the wordlist. If the word is found in a literacy book or from the translated
texts, list the page or reference in the bottom left corner in case you need to quickly check the context of the word during the workshop Participants will not recognize some verbs or other words out of
context. During the workshop, you will fill in other information on the cards when it can be confirmed, such as the word category in the bottom right corner, the number affix of nouns in the top left corner,
derivational affix below the inflectional affix, roots of polymorphemic words in the bottom center, a gender word such as a demonstrative that can follow the noun in the top center, and any other notation
that may be important for the dictionary. You may even find it helpful to mark each card for final segment, long or short vowel, tone, and other phonological detail as they are confirmed by comparison
and contrast in the workshop.
2.4.2 Preparing texts
As you write each word from the wordlist onto cards, also type them into a draft Fieldworks Lexicon file so that you can have an easy reference of which words are on cards and their spelling. That way you can
avoid having more than one card with the same word when adding words from the texts and literacy materials.
If the eight to ten texts have not already been typed, type and format them directly in Microsoft Word or Open Office. Some may advise typing the texts into Fieldworks so that the words can
automatically be entered into the lexicon rather than needing to be typed as entries in the lexicon after being typed in the stories in Word. However, if the texts are only typed in Fieldworks, the transfer of
texts from Fieldworks to Word puts each vernacular word and its gloss in an individual table or box, and this causes two problems.
First, when constructing grammar books after an RGC workshop, a common step is to search the texts for a particular word or morpheme, and copy and paste all clauses with the morpheme into the
exercise section following the lesson on that morpheme. But the boxes from the Fieldworks file in Word make this step nearly impossible. Second, it is often helpful to search for a particular word such as a
particle, connector, etc. in the Word document to determine how common it is, or to find its most common syntactic context. But sometimes the words in boxes from the Fieldworks file in Word are
inflectional affix gender word
final segment derivational affix
tone singular noun
plural noun confirmed long vowel
English gloss confirmed vowel
ɛ alphabet book page
line number in story root gloss root gloss
word category
skipped over in these kinds of searches. So, it is recommended that the texts be typed directly into Word in preparation for the first RGC workshop. As the texts are typed, each new word should be searched for
in the draft Fieldworks Lexicon. Those that are not yet listed should be entered and also written on cards.
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2.4.3 Marking texts
