Conventions
* Grammatical abbreviations are generally written in full or small caps to visually distinguish them from the translations of lexical words. For instance, capital or small-cap (frequently abbreviated to ) glosses a grammatical past-tense morpheme, while lower-case 'past' would be a literal translation of a word with that meaning. Similarly, (small) cap might be a locative suffix used in nominal inflections, prototypically indicating direction downward but possibly also used where it is not translatable as 'down' in English, whereas lower-case 'down' would be a direct English translation of a word meaning 'down'.Nina Sumbatova, 'Dargwa', in Maria Polinskaya (ed.) ''The Oxford Handbook of Languages of the Caucasus.'' Not all authors follow this convention. * Person-number-gender is often further abbreviated, in which case the elements are not small caps. E.g. 3ms or 3msg for , 2fp or 2fpl for , also 1di for and 1pe for . *Authors may more severely abbreviate glosses than is the norm, if they are particularly frequent within a text, e.g. rather than for 'immediate past'. This helps keep the gloss graphically aligned with the parsed text when the abbreviations are longer than the morphemes they gloss. Such shortened forms may be ambiguous with other authors or texts and so are not presented as normative here. Glosses may also be less abbreviated than the norm if they are not common in a particular text, so as to not tax the reader, e.g. for 'transitivizer' or for 'subjunctive'. At the extreme, glosses may not be abbreviated at all but simply written in small caps, e.g. , or rather than , , . Such long, obvious abbreviationse.g. in have been omitted from the list below, but are always possible. *A morpheme will sometimes be used as its own gloss. This is typically done when it is the topic of discussion, and the author wishes it to be immediately recognized in the gloss among other morphemes with similar meanings, or when it has multiple or subtle meanings that would be impractical to gloss with a single conventional abbreviation. For example, if a passage has two contrasting nominalizing suffixes under discussion, ''ɣiŋ'' and ''jolqəl'', they may be glossed and , with the glosses explained in the text. This is also seen when the meaning of a morpheme is debated, and glossing it one way or another would prejudice the discussion. *Lexical morphemes are typically translated, using lower-case letters, though they may be given a grammatical gloss in small caps if they play a grammatical role in the text. Exceptions include proper nouns, which typically are not translated, and kinship terms, which may be too complex to translate. Proper nouns/names may simply be repeated in the gloss, or may be replaced with a placeholder such as "(name.)" or "" (for a female name). For kinship glosses, see the dedicated section below for a list of standard abbreviations. *Lehmann recommends that abbreviations for syntactic roles not be used as glosses forLists
Nonabbreviated English words used as glosses are not included in the list below. Caution is needed with short glosses like , , and , which could potentially be either abbreviations or (as in these cases) nonabbreviated English prepositions used as glosses. Transparent compounds of the glosses below, such as or 'remote past', a compound of 'remote' and 'past', are not listed separately. Abbreviations beginning with (generalized glossing prefix for ''non-'', ''in-'', ''un-'') are not listed separately unless they have alternative forms that are included. For example, is not listed, as it is composable from + . This convention is grounded in the Leipzig Glossing Rules. Some authors use a lower-case ''n'', for example for 'non-human'.Maria Polinskaya (ed.) ''The Oxford Handbook of Languages of the Caucasus.'' Some sources are moving from classical lative () terminology to 'directional' (), with concommitant changes in the abbreviations. Other authors contrast -lative and -directive. Some sources use alternative abbreviations to distinguish e.g. ''nominalizer'' from ''nominalization'', or shorter abbreviations for compounded glosses in synthetic morphemes than for independent glosses in agglutinative morphemes. These are seldom distinct morphosyntactic categories in a language, though some may be distinguished in historical linguistics. They are not distinguished below, as any such usage tends to be idiosyncratic to the author.Punctuation and numbers
Grammatical abbreviations
Kinship
It is common to abbreviate grammatical morphemes but to translate lexical morphemes. However, kin relations commonly have no precise translation, and in such cases they are often glossed with anthropological abbreviations. Most of these are transparently derived from English; an exception is 'Z' for 'sister'. (In anthropological texts written in other languages, abbreviations from that language will typically be used, though sometimes the single-letter abbreviations of the basic terms listed below are seen.) A set of basic abbreviations is provided for nuclear kin terms (father, mother, brother, sister, husband, wife, son, daughter); additional terms may be used by some authors, but because the concept of e.g. 'aunt' or 'cousin' may be overly general or may differ between communities, sequences of basic terms are often used for greater precision. There are two competing sets of conventions, of one-letter and two-letter abbreviations:Philip Kreyenbroek (2009) ''From Daēnā to Dîn''. Harrassowitz.Lu, Tian Qiao (2008) ''A Grammar of Maonan''. Boca Raton, Florida: Universal Publishers. These are concatenated, e.g. MFZS = MoFaSiSo 'mother's father's sister's son', yBWF = yBrWiFa 'younger brother's wife's father'. 'Elder/older' and 'younger' may affix the entire string, e.g. oFaBrSo (an older cousin – specifically father's brother's son), MBDy (a younger cousin – specifically mother's brother's daughter) or a specific element, e.g. MFeZS 'mother's father's elder sister's son', HMeB 'husband's mother's elder brother'. 'Gen' indicates the generation relative to the ego, with ∅ for the same (zero) generation. E.g. Gen∅Ch (child of someone in the same generation, i.e. of a sibling or cousin); ♂Gen+1F (female one generation up, i.e. mother or aunt, of a male); Gen−2M (male two generations down, i.e. grandson or grandnephew). 'Cross' and 'parallel' indicate a change or lack of change in gender of siblings in the chain of relations. Parallel aunts and uncles are MoSi and FaBr; cross-aunts and uncles are FaSi and MoBr. Cross-cousins (+Cu) and parallel cousins (∥Cu) are children of the same. Parallel niece and nephew are children of a man's brother or woman's sister; cross-niece and nephew are the opposite. 'Elder' and 'younger' occurs before these markers: o∥Cu, y+Cu, and the gender of the ego comes at the very beginning, e.g. ♂o∥CuF, ♀y+CuM.Literature
*Notes
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Glossing abbreviations Lists of abbreviations