# Digitised, searchable Holle List in Stokhof (1980)

Author
Affiliations

Gede Primahadi Wijaya Rajeg

University of Oxford

Universitas Udayana

Published

May 23, 2023

Modified

February 3, 2025

Doi

10.25446/oxford.23205173

Keywords

Holle List, Word List, Language Documentation, Lexical Database, Indonesian languages, Digital Humanities

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

## 1 Introduction

The Holle List (hereafter HL) consists of approximately 1000 lexical items designed by K. F. Holle (1829-1896), an “eminent authority and lover of the Netherlands Indies and their people” (Stokhof 1980: 1). The HL was prepared to be dispersed across the Indonesian archipelago to gather knowledge about the linguistic situation of Indonesia, the then Dutch colony.

The HL exists in three variants (versions 1894, 1904/1911, and 1931) differing slightly in content and the order of the items. The HL in the `engganolang` GitHub repository and in the Oxford University Research Archive (ORA) (Rajeg 2023a) is the “new basic list (NBL)” set up by Stokhof (1980: 17, 22–72) “to facilitate comparative work” across the three different variants of the HL (see Table 1 for the interactive version and the raw file here). The NBL captures all lexical items appearing in the three variants of the HL, except those items “which never or hardly ever appeared to be filled in by the researchers” (Stokhof 1980: 17). These exception items appear as footnotes in the word list of each target language.

## 2 The rationale for the digitisation of the Holle List

The publication of the three variants of the Holle List as the new basic list (NBL) in Stokhof (1980) is available as an open-access PDF file under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license (license provided in the footer of the cover page in the PDF file). While the PDF itself is searchable via the basic find functionality in a PDF viewer, the list is obviously not manipulatable (e.g., when we want to filter certain items). It also cannot facilitate computational processing to automatically match the IDs of the list with the ID of the vocabulary in the target languages.

Given that the CC-BY license allows us to copy, adapt and build upon the material for any purpose, as long as we provide attribution (i.e., citation) to the original material, we decided to digitise the NBL into a fully searchable, portable format (i.e., a UTF-8 encoded, tab-separated plain text) (see Table 1 for the interactive version). The digitisation is conducted in conjunction with an AHRC-funded research titled “Lexical resources for Enggano, a threatened language of Indonesia” (cf. the main webpage). The research, amongst others, aims at bringing together a host of historical, paper-born resources available for Enggano into a diachronic lexical database, namely EnoLEX (cf. Krauße et al. 2024; Rajeg, Krauße & Pramartha 2024; Rajeg et al. 2025). The Enggano vocabularies in the Holle List is one of the oldest from the late 19th century (collected in 1895 by Abs vd Noord: see Stokhof & Almanar 1987: 189); this late 19th century word list of Enggano has also been digitised and deposited on GitHub, the Oxford Research Archive (ORA), the University of Oxford’s Sustainable Digital Scholarship (SDS) repository, and Zenodo (Rajeg 2023b).

### 2.1 Update!

This Holle List/NBL has been considered to be included in the Concepticon database (List et al. 2023) (cf. the note here).

## 3 Content of the digitised Holle List

The digitised, NBL Holle List (HL) preserves the original columns. The columns containing the years for the three versions of the Holle List were renamed so that these columns do not begin with numbers. Note that the first four columns are not labelled in the original PDF. These columns are the `Index`, `Dutch`, `English`, and `Indonesian`. The Indonesian glosses were taken from the 1931 version of the HL (Stokhof 1980: 18). It is the values in the `Index` column that can be computationally matched with the Index in the (also digitised) word lists of the target languages (published as subsequent volumes after Stokhof (1980)); a use case of this computational matching is performed in preparing the Enggano word list that is part of the HL (see Rajeg 2023b).

The values of the `English` column in Table 1 are hyperlinked to the Concept sets in the Concepticon catalogue (List et al. 2023). The initial mapping of the English glosses to the Concepticon Concept sets was programmatically performed using pyconcepticon (Forkel 2022), a Python package to access and curate the Concepticon data, following the tutorial in Tjuka (2020). The output of the mapping has also been manually curated and checked (track the changes here). However, there are cases where the English glosses cannot be linked to the relevant Concept sets because they are not yet mapped in the Concepticon data. For this case, the glosses are not hyperlinked.

We added several new columns after the version years columns. One of these is the `Swadesh` columns (Boolean `true`/`false`), indicating whether the entries are part of the Swadesh items (`true`) or not (`false`)1 (see Stokhof 1980: 141–143). From this table, it is then possible to easily filter out the Swadesh items, something that is not possible in the PDF version, since the NBL table does not directly include a column marking which items are from the Swadesh list; we then hand-coded this Swadesh column based on the index numbers provided by Stokhof (1980: 141–143).

An additional column after the `Swadesh` column is the `Swadesh_orig` column. It lists the English forms/labels given in the Swadesh appendix (Stokhof 1980: 141–143), which could be phrased differently in the `English` column in the NBL. When the forms in the `Swadesh` and the `English` columns are exact matches, the `Swadesh_orig` column is left empty. Moreover, typo corrections were done for the entries of the three language columns (either typo from the original PDF or typo due to the first-pass OCR error) (listed in the `Remark` column).

Next, there are two additional tables (to the right panel of Table 1). These contain phrases and clauses from the 1904/1911 (raw file) and the 1931 (raw file) editions of the HL.

Finally, Table 4 provides the transcription table for each edition of the HL, including the approximate phonetic symbols (Stokhof 1980: 75–77, §6.2).

We hope that the digitised NBL of the Holle List can be helpful for, and escalate the workflow of, other researchers with computational orientation. Readers/users are also encouraged to check the original PDF list in Stokhof (1980).

Code

    # read the concepticon mapping
    concepticon <- read_tsv("data/concepticon-mapping.tsv") |>
      rename(Index = NUMBER,
             English = GLOSS,
             Concepticon_Gloss = CONCEPTICON_GLOSS) |>
      select(-SIMILARITY) |>
      mutate(concept_url = paste("https://concepticon.clld.org/parameters/",
                                 CONCEPTICON_ID,
                                 sep = ""))
    concepticon_checked <- concepticon |>
      filter(CHECKED == "y") |>
      select(English, Index, Concepticon_Gloss, concept_url) |>
      mutate(Index = as.character(Index))

    holle_tb <- read_tsv("data/digitised-holle-list-in-stokhof-1980.tsv")
    holle_tb <- holle_tb |>
      # merge with the checked concepticon mapping
      left_join(concepticon_checked, by = join_by(Index, English)) |>
      mutate(English = replace(English, is.na(English), ""))
    url_eng <- '<a href="%s" target="_blank">%s</a>'
    holle_tb |>
      reactable(style = list(fontFamily = "Canela Text"),
                searchable = TRUE,
                elementId = "digitised-holle-list",
                filterable = TRUE,
                highlight = TRUE,
                resizable = TRUE,
                bordered = TRUE,
                borderless = FALSE,
                defaultPageSize = 20,
                wrap = FALSE,
                columns = list(
                  Index = colDef(align = "center",
                                 sticky = "left"),
                  Dutch = colDef(minWidth = 150,
                                 cell = function(value, index, name) {tippy(text = value, tooltip = value)}),
                  English = colDef(minWidth = 150,
                                   cell = function(value, index, name) {tippy(text = if_else(!is.na(holle_tb$Concepticon_Gloss[index]),
                                                                                             sprintf(url_eng,
                                                                                                     holle_tb$concept_url[index],
                                                                                                     value),
                                                                                        value),
                                                                              tooltip = value)}),
                  Indonesian = colDef(minWidth = 150,
                                      cell = function(value, index, name) {tippy(text = value, tooltip = value)}),
                  v1894 = colDef(align = "center"),
                  `v1904/1911` = colDef(align = "center"),
                  v1931 = colDef(align = "center"),
                  Swadesh = colDef(align = "center"),
                  Swadesh_orig = colDef(minWidth = 150),
                  Concepticon_Gloss = colDef(show = FALSE),
                  concept_url = colDef(show = FALSE)
                ))

Table 1: The digitised, new basic list of the Holle List in Stokhof (1980: 22–72)
Code

    holle_1904_tb <- read_tsv("data/digitised-holle-list-in-stokhof-1980-add-1904_1911.tsv")

    holle_1904_tb |>
      reactable(style = list(fontFamily = "Canela Text"),
                elementId = "1904-edition",
                searchable = TRUE,
                filterable = TRUE,
                highlight = TRUE,
                resizable = TRUE,
                bordered = TRUE,
                borderless = FALSE,
                defaultPageSize = 10,
                wrap = FALSE,
                columns = list(
                  Index = colDef(align = "center",
                                 sticky = "left"),
                  Dutch = colDef(minWidth = 150,
                                 cell = function(value, index, name) {tippy(text = value, tooltip = value)}),
                  English = colDef(minWidth = 150,
                                   cell = function(value, index, name) {tippy(text = value, tooltip = value)}),
                  Indonesian = colDef(minWidth = 150,
                                      cell = function(value, index, name) {tippy(text = value, tooltip = value)})
                ))

Table 2: The additional list from the 1904/1911 edition (Stokhof 1980: 73–74)
Code

    holle_1931_tb <- read_tsv("data/digitised-holle-list-in-stokhof-1980-add-1931.tsv")

    holle_1931_tb |>
      reactable(style = list(fontFamily = "Canela Text"),
                elementId = "1931-edition",
                searchable = TRUE,
                filterable = TRUE,
                highlight = TRUE,
                resizable = TRUE,
                bordered = TRUE,
                borderless = FALSE,
                defaultPageSize = 10,
                wrap = FALSE,
                columns = list(
                  Index = colDef(align = "center",
                                 sticky = "left"),
                  Dutch = colDef(minWidth = 150,
                                 cell = function(value, index, name) {tippy(text = value, tooltip = value)}),
                  English = colDef(minWidth = 150,
                                   cell = function(value, index, name) {tippy(text = value, tooltip = value)}),
                  Indonesian = colDef(minWidth = 150,
                                      cell = function(value, index, name) {tippy(text = value, tooltip = value)})
                ))

Table 3: The additional list from the 1931 edition (Stokhof 1980: 72–73)
Code

    nbl_transcript <- read_csv("data/nbl_transcription_table.csv", na = "") |>
      mutate(across(where(is.character), ~replace_na(., "")))

    nbl_transcript |>
      reactable(style = list(fontFamily = "Canela Text"),
                elementId = "nbl-transcript",
                searchable = TRUE,
                filterable = TRUE,
                highlight = TRUE,
                resizable = TRUE,
                bordered = TRUE,
                borderless = FALSE,
                defaultPageSize = 20,
                wrap = FALSE,
                columns = list(
                  `v1894/1901/1911` = colDef(align = "center"),
                  v1931 = colDef(align = "center"),
                  `Approx. Phonetic Sym.` = colDef(align = "center"),
                  `Example/Remarks` = colDef(minWidth = 150,
                                 cell = function(value, index, name) {tippy(text = value, tooltip = value)}),
                  My_notes = colDef(show = FALSE,
                                    cell = function(value, index, name) {tippy(text = value, tooltip = value)})
                ))

Table 4: The resume of transcription symbols and notes for each edition (Stokhof 1980: 75–77, §6.2)

## References

Forkel, Robert. 2022. Pyconcepticon: Programmatic curation of Concepticon-data. https://github.com/concepticon/pyconcepticon.
Krauße, Daniel, Gede Primahadi Wijaya Rajeg, Cokorda Rai Adi Pramartha, Erik Zobel, Bernd Nothofer, Charlotte Hemmings, Sarah Ogilvie, I Wayan Arka & Mary Dalrymple. 2024. EnoLEX: A diachronic lexical database for the Enggano language. Online database. University of Oxford. https://doi.org/10.25446/oxford.28282169.v1.
List, Johann Mattis, Annika Tjuka, Mathilda Van Zantwijk, Frederic Blum, Carlos Barrientos Ugarte, Christoph Rzymski, Simon Greenhill & Robert Forkel. 2023. CLLD concepticon 3.1.0. https://doi.org/10.5281/ZENODO.7777629.
Rajeg, Gede Primahadi Wijaya. 2023a. Digitised, searchable Holle List in Stokhof (1980). Dataset. University of Oxford. https://doi.org/10.25446/oxford.23205173.
Rajeg, Gede Primahadi Wijaya. 2023b. CLDF dataset of the Enggano word list from 1895 in Stokhof and Almanar’s (1987) Holle List. University of Oxford. https://doi.org/10.25446/oxford.23515788.
Rajeg, Gede Primahadi Wijaya, Daniel Krauße & Cokorda Pramartha. 2024. EnoLEX: A diachronic lexical database for the Enggano language. In Ai Inoue, Naho Kawamoto & Makoto Sumiyoshi (eds.), AsiaLex 2024 proceedings: Asian Lexicography - Merging cutting-edge and established approaches, 123–132. Toyo University, Tokyo, Japan. https://doi.org/10.25446/oxford.27013864.
Rajeg, Gede Primahadi Wijaya, Daniel Krauße, Cokorda Rai Adi Pramartha, Erik Zobel, Bernd Nothofer, Charlotte Hemmings, Sarah Ogilvie, I Wayan Arka & Mary Dalrymple. 2025. R codes and curated dataset for “EnoLEX: A Diachronic Lexical Database for the Enggano Language.” Computer Software. University of Oxford. https://doi.org/10.25446/oxford.28282946.v1.
Stokhof, W. A. L. (ed.). 1980. Holle Lists, vocabularies in languages of Indonesia, Vol. 1: Introductory Volume. Vol. Materials in Languages of Indonesia. Canberra, A.C.T., Australia: Dept. of Linguistics, Research School of Pacific Studies, The Australian National University. https://core.ac.uk/reader/159464813.
Stokhof, W. A. L. & Alma E. Almanar. 1987. Holle Lists, vocabularies in languages of Indonesia, Vol. 10/3: Islands off the west coast of Sumatra (Pacific Linguistics (Series d) 76). Vol. Materials in Languages of Indonesia. Canberra, A.C.T., Australia: Dept. of Linguistics, Research School of Pacific Studies, The Australian National University. http://hdl.handle.net/1885/144589.
Tjuka, Annika. 2020. Adding concept lists to Concepticon: A guide for beginners. https://calc.hypotheses.org/2225.

## Footnotes

1. There are also Swadesh items that do not have number index in the NBL. These items are marked with “`--`” in the PDF (Stokhof 1980: 141–143); they can be viewed and downloaded here↩︎

## Reuse

CC BY-SA 4.0

## Citation

For attribution, please cite this work as:
Rajeg, Gede Primahadi Wijaya. 2023. Digitised, searchable Holle List in Stokhof (1980). University of Oxford. https://doi.org/10.25446/oxford.23205173.