The Nedj Nedj databases 3 DEVELOPMENT // 4 COLUMNS AND FIELDS 4.1 General info fields

3. THE PROCESS OF DEVELOPING THE DATABASES

The Nedj Nedj databases grew out of a study of the Australian Aboriginal language of Sydney. The first database was a simple listing of an Aboriginal language word with a translation alongside. Little by little it was found necessary to elaborate on the basic record to include parts of speech, suffixes, cases, tenses and more. Related databases were developed for special allied purposes, and new databases created for additional languages (there were once around 250 such languages). For a description of these databases, see <bayaladatabases.blogspot.com>.

To extend the databases to the analysis of Ancient Egyptian it was necessary to devise a way to include the hieroglyphs themselves.

What is special about these databases is their ability to search, and sort, and to throw up connections. Out of this come insights into the essence of the words being looked at. Some such insights arising out of the databases may be reviewed at <hierolanginsights.blogspot.com>.

4. COLUMNS AND FIELDS

The main layout in the Hierolex Databases is Overview. Each record is presented through a number of ‘fields’ in the database, which appear as columns in this layout. They will be described in turn.

4.1. ‘GENERAL INFO’ GROUP OF FIELDS

Fig. 4.11 ‘Comment’ group of fields

The first portion of a record contains five ‘general information’ fields.

comment: cream

In the {comment} field can be placed any remarks of possible interest. However, most often this field is left empty.

original: grey

When a record is looking at a single word occurring ass part of a sentence, the whole sentence will be shown [in square brackets] in the {original} field. Hence, in the middle record above the glyphs say ‘pu’; and from the {original} field, this can be deduced to be the second word of the sentence beginning na pu ... .

glyph: white and blue

There are in fact two {glyph} fields in the illustration above. The first is the white background for the ‘original’ field just described.

Fig. 4.12 The {glyph} field

The second {glyph} field is the square blue field on the right, seen in use in Fig. 4.11 above. This is a ‘related’ field, drawing information from elsewhere, specifically the auxiliary Hiero JS Names database where all the glyph information used in the Hierolex database is stored. (For more on the Hiero JS Names database see Section 9 below.). An image appears in the blue {glyph} field only if there is an exact match between the Hierolex and the Hiero JS Names databases. This does not happen all that often.

status: pink

The {status} field is used to show when an entry has been inserted by the compiler, rather than by some original source. This circumstance is indicated by ‘JS’, and occurs when a word is extracted from an original sentence, for special attention.