Why this exists
Phonology Assistant reads Toolbox, FieldWorks, Speech Analyzer and PAXML — but not Dekereke. So the usual approach is to export a snapshot, and export again after every session of data entry.
This add-on removes that step entirely. Phonology Assistant keeps pointing at your actual Dekereke file and notices when it changes, so your charts, searches and CV patterns always reflect what you just typed.
Using it
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Install, then start Phonology Assistant
The installer locates Phonology Assistant on its own and registers a normal uninstall entry.
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File → New Project, then Add → “Dekereke Data Source…”
The same item appears under Project Settings for a project you already have open.
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Confirm the column mapping
Dekereke column names are yours to choose, so nothing here is hard-coded: the add-on reads the column names out of your own database and proposes a mapping. Correct anything it guessed wrong, then click OK.
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Go back to work
Every time you save in Dekereke and switch to Phonology Assistant, it refreshes itself.
Worth knowing
Your database is never written to
The Dekereke file is only ever read. Conversion happens on a copy, in a private cache folder.
Any Dekereke database
Column inventories differ from project to project. English and Indonesian column names are both recognised.
Remap whenever you like
Hold Shift while the project loads to reopen the mapping dialog.
Every encoding in the field
Older UTF-16 databases and current UTF-8 ones both load, with nothing to configure.
Requirements
- Phonology Assistant 4.1.1 on Windows — the add-on installs into its
AddOnsfolder - A Dekereke phonology database. Dekereke is Rod Casali’s software, at casali.canil.ca
- Administrator rights, either way — Phonology Assistant lives in Program Files, so copying files into it needs elevation whether you run the installer or the manual-install zip. The zip is for people who would rather not run an installer, not a way around the permission
Windows will warn you before it runs
The installer is not code-signed, so Windows SmartScreen shows “Windows protected your PC” with an unknown publisher. Click More info, then Run anyway. This is expected, and worth knowing about before it happens rather than after.
Signing certificates cost money this project does not have. What it offers instead is that every release is built in the open: the build runs publicly on GitHub from the source in this repository, and each download on the release page carries a SHA-256 you can check against the file you received.
If something looks wrong
The add-on writes a plain-text log of everything it does — each reload, how many records were converted, and how many were skipped for having no phonetic form:
%LOCALAPPDATA%\PaDekereke\addon.log
That file is the most useful thing to attach to a bug report.