History
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:
- ni-1 c-2 chihui3 -lia4 in5 no-6 piltzin7 ce8 calli9 ich1 mache3 es2 für4 der5 mein6 Sohn7 ein8 Haus9
This "inline" style allows examples to be included within the flow of text, and for the word order of the target language to be written in an order which approximates the target language syntax. (In the gloss here, mache es is reordered from the corresponding source order to approximate German syntax more naturally.) Even so, this approach requires the readers to "re-align" the correspondences between source and target forms.
More modern 19th and 20th-century approaches took to glossing vertically, aligning the same sort of word-by-word content in such a way that the metalanguage terms were placed vertically below the source language terms. In this style, the given example might be rendered thus (here English gloss):
-
ni- c- chihui -lia in no- piltzin ce calli I it make for to-the my son a house I made my son a house.
Note that here word ordering is determined by the syntax of the object language.
Finally, modern linguists have adopted the practice of using abbreviated grammatical category labels. A recent (2008) publication which repeats this example labels it as follows:
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ni-c-chihui-lia in no-piltzin ce calli 1SG.SUBJ-3SG.OBJ-mach-APPL DET 1SG.POSS-Sohn ein Haus
This approach is denser and also requires effort to read, but it is less reliant on the grammatical structure of the metalanguage for expressing the semantics of the target forms.
Read more about this topic: Interlinear Gloss
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