In linguistics and pedagogy, an interlinear gloss is a gloss (series of brief explanations, such as definitions or pronunciations) placed between lines, such as between a line of original text and its translation into another language. When glossed, each line of the original text acquires one or more corresponding lines of transcription known as an interlinear text or interlinear glossed text (IGT) an interlinear for short. Such glosses help the reader follow the relationship between the source text and its translation, and the structure of the original language. In its simplest form, an interlinear gloss is a literal, word-for-word translation of the source text.

History

thumb|Interlinear text in , a [[Spanish language|Spanish textbook for German speakers, 1910]]

Interlinear glosses have been used for a variety of purposes over a long period of time. One common usage has been to annotate bilingual textbooks for language education. This sort of interlinearization serves to help make the meaning of a source text explicit without attempting to formally model the structural characteristics of the source language.

Such annotations have occasionally been expressed not through interlinear layout, but rather through enumeration of words in the object and meta language. One such example is Wilhelm von Humboldt's annotation of Classical Nahuatl:

Word-by-word alignment. According to the Leipzig Glossing Rules, it is standard to left-align the words in the object language with the corresponding words in the metalanguage; this alignment can be seen between lines (1-3) and line (4).

Morpheme-by-morpheme correspondence. At the sub-word level, segmentable morphemes are separated by hyphens, both in the example and in the gloss. There should be the same number of hyphens in the example and in the gloss, as shown in the following example:

Grammatical category labels. In , the stem () is translated into the corresponding English lexeme (stay) while the inflectional affixes () and () are inflectional affixes representing future tense and negation. These inflectional affixes are glossed as FUT and NEG; a list of standard abbreviations for grammatical categories that are widely used in linguistics can be found in the Leipzig Glossing Rules.

One-to-many correspondences. When a single object-language element corresponds to several metalanguage elements, they are separated by periods.

See also

  • Kanbun – Japanese tradition of glossing Classical Chinese texts
  • Ruby text – a gloss sometimes used with Chinese or Japanese to show the pronunciation
  • Part-of-speech tagging, often displayed as interlinear glosses under the tagged words, sometimes at the same time as an interlinear word-by-word translation
  • Treebanks, often displayed as a gloss or annotation to the original text.
  • James Hamilton, nineteenth-century composer and promoter of interlinear texts for language learning
  • Metaphrase
  • List of glossing abbreviations

References

  • The Leipzig Glossing Rules: Conventions for interlinear morpheme-by-morpheme glosses
  • Interlinear Glossed Text Standards (E-MELD)
  • Interlinear Glossed Text Levels (E-MELD)
  • Towards a General Model of Interlinear Text (E-MELD)
  • Interlinear Morphemic Glosses
  • Glossing Ancient Languages and Texts. A forum for recommendations on the Interlinar Morphemic Glossing of ancient languages as attested in ancient manuscripts.
  • Online Interlinear of Biblical Greek Scriptures (New Testament) text
  • ODIN - The Online Database of INterlinear text<!--formerly(?) at http://odin.linguistlist.org/-->
  • Latinum Interlinear Method page Listing of older interlinear and construed texts, mostly from Latin or Ancient Greek and mostly to English
  • Ernest Blum, "The New Old Way of Learning Languages", The American Scholar, Autumn 2008.