Kola Saami Christian Text Corpus (2024)

Abstract: Christian texts have been known to be printed in Kola Saami languages since 1828; the most extensive publication is the Gospel of Matthew, different translations of which have been published three times since 1878, most recently in 2022. The Lord’s Prayer was translated in several more versions in Kildin Saami and Skolt Saami, first in 1828. All of these texts seem to go back to translations from Rus- sian. Such characteristics make these pub- lications just right for parallel text align- ment. This paper describes ongoing work with building a Kola Saami Christian Text Cor- pus, including conceptional and technical decisions. Thus, it describes a resource, rather than a study. However, compu- tational studies based on these data will hopefully take place in the near future, af- ter the Kildin Saami subset of this corpus is finished and published by the end of 2024. In addition to computation, this resource will also allow for comparative linguistic studies on diachronic and synchronic vari- ation and change in Kola Saami languages, which are among the most endangered and least described Uralic languages.

## corpus data all mentioned saami text sources from the 19th century are in the public domain. the same is true for versions in other languages which are all potentially useful for text parallelization but not inlcuded here. some of the kola saami texts were available in digital form earlier, others were digitized and proofread by me. also markus juutinen (university of oulu) -with whom i exchanged significant parts of these data -digitized and proofread texts for his abovementioned study. in addition, i worked together with sergey nikolaev (a saami from russia, today living in oulu, finland). later i started uploading texts to wikisource, foot_1 where proofreading and indexing has since been continued with the help of collaborators, who i don't know personally. parts of the 1878 edition of the gospel-currently including chapters 3 through 10 -have been structured and made available as a corpus by the lingvodoc project led by julia normanskaja (ils ras, moscow). this corpus is structured in xml (at the levels of chapter, verse, word, and bound morpheme) and includes the original orthography, a russian translation, tokenization of the original orthography and a translation of each token in contemporary kildin saami, and a morphological interlinearization with glosses. @xcite the user rights for jesus friend of children were cleared by the language bank of finland already in 1989, when the printed book was digitized in a project led by pirkko suihkonen (university of helsinki). @xcite the digital data was stored in pre-processed form -including text files with pre-unicode encoding and including ocr errors -when i got in contact with the language bank in 2015. i was allowed to create a working copy of the repository for my own research. after having fixed the encoding and rebuilt antonova's spelling with the help of a pearl script and additional manual correction, and gave my improved version of the corpus back to the colleagues in helsinki. but unfortunately, the kildin saami data has still not been published by the language bank. the user rights for the new translation of the gospel have yet to be cleared, 7 but the copyright laws of finland and the european union principally allow the use of such data as research material -including communicating it as part of research activities -even without a specific agreement with the copyright holders. this includes the typical processes for text and data mining of printed texts: digitizing as well as digital storing and processing. @xcite it is also legal to publishing fragments as data illustrations for the purpose of teaching or in scientific publications, like in this paper. however, more specifically defined user rights for antonova's translation of the gospel will hopefully lead to an open corpus publication in the future. ideally, this can be done using the functional user interface korp, for instance at giellalt in tromsø, which promotes open science and with whom scheller has been collaborating for several years. @xcite but also the korp platform at the language bank @xcite the metadata in the repository, dated july 10. 1998, specify that the texts of the computer corpus of kildin sámi have been donated to the university of helsinki by the institute for bible translation (stockholm, sweden) to be used as research material. reference to the corpus has to be made in papers in which it is used as a source. the overview in table (1) lists the subparts of the corpus and the currrent state of their completion (year refers to the date of origin (≤ marks a terminus ante quem), the data of first publication is shown in parenthesis; word tokens may be due to corrections later). it seems that the very existence of these par-10 see https://clarino.uib.no/comedi/editor/lb-2020021121 (2024-10-11). also the work with the new translation of the gospel would likely have profited from a more complete overview of earlier texts. deducing from the description of the translation and edition process in scheller (2022) the two text correctors (scheller and galkina) were not aware of all different earlier versions of the lord's prayer, not even antonova's own. and scheller doesn't mention in the preface that antonova's earlier translation of new testament texts would potentially be related to her new translation of gospel of matthew. see, for instance the sermon on the mount, which antonova translated in two different versions. this may be counterintuitive for readers, even if both versions are idiomatic kildin saami. @xcite ## technical procedures and conventions building this corpus has been carried out for two decades already as part of the author's work with the kola saami documentation project (ksdp) foot_5 but did not aim at more than a convenient corpus of interesting data samples until very recently. work on this corpus has also never been funded by means of a specific project grant. at present, the corpus is stored and versioned in a private github repository, foot_6 because parts of it are protected by copyright and can only be shared with research collaborators. all original texts have either been digitally copied from other repositories or digitized by means of ocr by me before being modelled in xml. the data is encoded in utf-8. xlm markup follows the conventions of ksdp (cf. blokland et al. 2015, pp. 12-14). there are other, more common formats available for modelling corpus data nowadays than xml (e.g. json). but xml has been the format of choice for ksdp because its data already includes a large amount of speech recordings and even video recordings, all of which are annotated and time-aligned in xml with the help of the tool elan. @xcite adding written corpus data in the same structure (even though time-alignment is not relevant for written data) makes cross-corpus searches very simple. on the other hand, the used xml structure is consistent and well documented and can therefore easily be converted in other formats if future users prefer to do so. since the original intention of this project was different from digitization projects run by archival institutions or libraries, original pagination is not modelled in these corpus data. also, all non-textual graphical details on the original pages are ignored because this corpus is aimed to serve linguistic research. all texts are first chunked at the chapter level (if they are longer than one chapter). this chunking resulted in separate files which can be called "corpus sessions" (and which are conceptually equal to corpus sessions consisting of one continuous speech recording, e.g. an interview or a procedural, in the case of mul-timedia corpus data for kola saami). in the case of the gospel, each corpus session is chunked for verses, in order to keeping the original indexes for parallelization. the different versions of lord's prayer are not printed in one consistent verse structure, but manual alignment is simple for this short text and done based on verses matthew 9:6-13 throughout all versions. thus, parallel locations in the different versions of the gospel -including lord's prayer -are linked to each other by means of a pointer to chapters and verses. whereas the verses in the gospel are relatively long and often include several sentences, other texts are chunked for sentences. this is how i typically also chunk my other written corpus sessions because sentences are conceptually equal to utterances in my spoken corpus data. textual structure at larger levels (headers, empty lines, paragraphs, etc.) is modelled by means of additional markup, added by me in the text if needed. no further lexical, morphological, or syntactic tagging of the corpus has been carried out so far. currently, i focus on the consistent and complete structuring of the kildin saami parts and complete proofreading of the akkala saami and skolt saami parts. but inspection and even systematic filtering of many morphosyntactic forms is already possible using regex and lists of bound and free grammatical markers. ## preliminary linguistic observations the parallel data in tables (2) and (3) -illustrating language use in worlds almost 200 years apart from each other -clearly show that the kildin saami language has not changed substantially since 1826. these versions are relatively similar in terms of syntax, morphology, and lexicon. but there are also differences, some of them may indicate language change, others are due to different choices by the translators, or perhaps translation errors. for instance, antonova's syntax is clearly more involved than the older translation. perhaps this is because it tries to reproduce the underlying russian constructions. antonova had been translating very produc2 ). note, for instance the creative translation of "amen" with a saami discourse marker in her 1996 version. this seems to originate from a sudden inspiration but was revoked again later and instead the russian form of this declaration is used. @xcite interesting is also the order of the possessive pronoun. antonova puts it after the head noun like in the russian original, even though the constituent order in saami is much stricter than in russian and would normally not allow this (see also the comparison of the different versions of the gospel reveals interesting findings. already the very first sentence (1:1) is recorded in three different versions, including a fragment of the unpublished manuscript by antonova which was mentioned by scheller (2022). this sentence describes jesus christ's descent after david and abraham, thus in chronological relation to the babylonian captivity. syntactically, this sentence consists only of a noun phrase in all three versions (see thus, already in its current form, the kola saami christian text corpus allows interesting studies on diachronic and synchronic variation and change in kildin saami. the next step will be the complete inclusion of the mentioned akkala saami and skolt saami texts. the availability of this resource will hopefully prompt new qualitative and quantitative linguistic studies on these uralic languages in the future.