Standardizing Phonetic Transcriptions for Kitchen et al.'s Comparative Wordlist on Semitic Languages with Language-Specific Orthography Profile

Comparative wordlists are a fundamental tool for tracing language history, allowing us to see how languages are related, much like biologists use DNA to infer phylogenies of species. When linguists compile data from different sources, scholars often code lexical data differently, using individual transcription systems that cannot be directly compared with each other. In order to make such data comparable, individual transcription systems must be unified in order to reflect a common standard. This study illustrates how such unification can be done by taking a particularly diverse dataset on Semitic languages as example and illustrating how transcriptions for individual language varieties can be harmonized as part of the general standardization workflow proposed by the Cross-Linguistic Data Formats initiative.