BDPROTO is a database of phonological inventories from ancient and reconstructed languages. The aggregated phonological inventory data and associated metadata is available in a flat CSV file in this directory named bdproto.csv. Bibliographic references for each data point are available in the sources.bib file.
BDPROTO 1.0 is described in:
Marsico, Egidio, Sebastien Flavier, Annemarie Verkerk and Steven Moran. 2018. BDPROTO: A Database of Phonological Inventories from Ancient and Reconstructed Languages. In Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018), 1654-1658. May 7-12, Miyazaki, Japan. Online: http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2018/pdf/534.pdf.
An expanded version, BDPROTO 1.1, is described in:
Moran, Steven, Eitan Grossman and Annemarie Verkerk. 2020. Investigating diachronic trends in phonological inventories using BDPROTO. Language Resources and Evaluation. Online: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10579-019-09483-3.
If you use the BDPROTO data in your research, please cite the specific version for replicability purposes. We archive each release of BDPROTO in Zenodo.
The original source data (and project name) come from:
Marsico, Egidio. 1999. What can a database of proto-languages tell us about the last 10,000 years of sound changes. In Proceedings of the XIVth International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS99), 353-356. Online: https://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org/icphs-proceedings/ICPhS1999/papers/p14_0353.pdf
This legacy resource was converted into Unicode UTF-8 using principles defined in Moran & Cysouw, 2018. The original BDPROTO data is available in various formats along with the extraction and transformation scripts at: https://github.com/bdproto/bdproto-legacy. BDPROTO-legacy contains a convenience sample aimed at genealogical diversity and it contains no duplicate inventories for a given reconstruction.
Three additional resources have been compiled to update and extend the coverage of the original BDPROTO sample. These include the raw data in the src directory for the three resources ancient-near-east, uz, and huji. These data points contain more recent reconstructions, which in some cases introduces more than one inventory for a given reconstruction.
The ancient-near-east inventories were collected as part of a project on ancient Near East languages at the Department of Comparative Linguistics at the University of Zurich. Additional inventories were also extracted from source references at the Department of Comparative Linguistics (we simply call this source uz). Ongoing work by The Hebrew University of Jerusalem includes phonological inventories from recent publications. This source is labeled huji.
For all four data sources, we have gathered additional metadata (where available) including identifying information such as Glottolog codes, but also information about estimated time-depths, possible homelands, etc. The phonological inventory data and metadata are aggregated from the four raw data sources into a single flat-file table, available in this directory, called bdproto.csv.
We have also collected and curated references for each data point and we make them available in the sources.bib file.