2.2 Language assistant questionnaires
Questionnaires were administered to many of the language assistants who gave the wordlists. The questions were mainly developed in order to help establish the reliability of the data. Information
gathered from questionnaires was also used to determine which dialects still needed to be sampled, dialects that had not initially been selected based on the literature search.
2.3 Linguistic comparison and analysis
A variety of comparisons and analyses were carried out on the data. These included the following:
Establishing the phonemes for each dialect
Comparing the number of lexically similar items in each wordlist
Determining phonological changes in each wordlist
Correlating phonological changes and postulating a family tree for the Semai dialects
Reconstructing lexical forms of proto-Semai
Estimating the percentage of borrowed words for each dialect
3 Results
This section presents the results of the analytical methods used to understand the relationships that exist among the varieties of Semai represented by the wordlists collected during the current research. Despite
the simplicity of the data collection method, there is a great wealth of information that can be drawn from the data.
First, although the Semai language has many dialects and variations, it is useful to consider the basic, overall phonology of the language. The various dialects are then compared to this basic phonology
see section 3.1 Basic Phonology. Second, the wordlists are lexically compared to show the degrees of lexical similarity that exist
among the different varieties of Semai see section 3.2 Shared Word Families. Third, an attempt is made to discern dialect boundaries by comparing shared word families; that is,
looking for dialects that could be linked together by unique sets of related words see section 3.3 Basic Lexical Comparison.
Fourth, consistent phonological changes from the norm are compared as another reflection of dialect boundaries see section 3.4 Shared Phonological Changes.
Fifth, the historical comparative method is used to postulate a family tree for the Semai dialects and to reconstruct several hundred Proto-Semai words see section 3.5 Comparative Reconstruction of Proto-
Semai. Lastly, some observations are made on topics that were observed but not rigorously investigated as
part of this research see section 3.7 Some Other Observations.
3.1 Basic phonology