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These programs are relatively theory neutral, have friendly GUI, and are explicit in
their claim to be Unicode-based.
With regard to the Igbo texts, one can differentiate between two types. The first
type is made up of texts without tone marks:
Ị ka nọrịrị Obinna? Obinna tụgharịrị hụ Ogbenyeanụ...
The second type is tone marked like the text below:
Ị̀ kà nọ̀rị̀rị̀ Óbìńnà? Óbìńnà tụ̀ghàrị̀rị̀ hụ́ Ógbènyèánụ
A typical Igbo text written by native speakers for fellow native speakers is usually
not tone-marked, simply because many find it tedious, although tone marking Igbo
texts would make a great deal of difference. However, for any serious linguistic work
or research, the Igbo texts are usually tone-marked. The tone-marked Igbo text above
was produced with version 2.0 of the Igbo Keyman program. The rendition in version 3,
which is soon to be released, is much better. However, I used mainly Igbo texts without
tone marks in my work with the above-named three corpus programs. I examined
them based on (1) how they handled the text input; and, (2) how they handled Igbo
words, with and without diacritics. I shall present the programs individually.
3.1 WordSmith
The basic problem encountered with WordSmith is that not ALL components of the
software are able to handle the Igbo texts appropriately.
For text input, it is not possible to add words with diacritics, either directly through
the Igbo Keyman keyboard or simply by copying and pasting. For example, a keyboard
input of the word ọgụ results in ‘ügß’ (see the WordSmith-Concordance screenshot),
while pasting the word only yields a blank in the entry box. In both cases, activating
‘Search’ does not yield any results.
Figure 1: Text Input in WordSmith
In terms of processing an entry, the concordance component of the software does
not function properly. As long as a word to be searched does not bear any diacritics
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