STEDT Search Help

System Requirements

To search the STEDT database, you must be using a modern browser (e.g. the latest version of Firefox, Chrome, Safari, or IE8) with javascript enabled.

You should also have installed a Unicode font which includes IPA and other linguistic transcription characters (free fonts such as Charis SIL and Gentium have good IPA support). You will also want a Unicode font that include the “allofam sign” ⪤ ([U+2AA4], a.k.a. GREATER-THAN OVERLAPPING LESS-THAN; this character is supported by recent Apple Symbol fonts, Cambria, and also by the (now deprecated) STEDT Font (STEDTU)).

General

In the STEDT Simple Search interface, you can search any combination of the following fields:

Enter your search terms and find matches (if any) for your query, drawn from selected STEDT Etyma and from the STEDT Lexical database.

• After an initial Search, the resulting window contains two panes:
  • If you entered a search term in the form or (proto)gloss field, the upper Etyma pane lists STEDT Etyma matching your query (otherwise, it shows a random selection of etyma).
    • The Etyma available here are drawn from the set of published STEDT Etyma, including roots from:
      • The Tibeto-Burman Reproductive System: Toward an Etymological Thesaurus (Matisoff 2008)
      • Sino-Tibetan : A conspectus (Benedict, 1972)
      • etc.
  • The lower Lexicon pane lists entries from the STEDT Lexicon matching your query.
    • The records available here include lexical data from a wide variety of Sino-Tibetan daughter languages.
      • Living
      • Classical
      • Extinct

Note: Once the two-pane view has loaded, Etyma/Lexicon search functionality is split between the two panes. That is, the upper search fields (proto-form and proto-gloss) query the STEDT Etyma, while the lower search fields (form, gloss, language, and language group) query the STEDT Lexical database.

Example Search #1:

• You search for the English word “cat” in the (proto)gloss field.
  • The result in the upper Etyma pane shows one “ST Root”, with the reconstructed protoform *roŋ and protogloss ‘CAT, TIGER’.
    • The first column has a link on the text “12 r's”;
    • clicking this link will bring up all 12 supporting forms (“reflexes”) tagged in relation to this ST Root in the lower Lexicon pane.
    • highlighted (yellow) morphosyllables belong to this ST Root
  • The result in the lower Lexicon pane shows a number of words for “cat” in ST languages.
    • Links on any analyzed syllables in the form (Reflex) column bring up a pop-up box with the appropriate etymology. Clicking on the "Details" link in this box opens a new page with the thesaurus entry for that etymon;
    • Links on items in the language (Language Name) column open a new page containing information on this language, including a list of STEDT lexical sources, genetic classification (the row will be highlighted), and ISO codes;
    • Links on items in the source (Source Bibliography) column open a new page containing the bibliographic record for this lexical source, and STEDT’s preferred citation form.
  • Click on any column header to sort the rows by the column values.

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