relative roots

[FIDELHOLTZ_DOOCHIN_JAMES_LAWRENCE]

Hi, Monica & all, 

The various comments to this thread have been enlightening and useful.  I 
have two more to make, the first minor and on thread: the solution to many 
quandaries will often have to do with the intended audience: the wider it 
is, the more user-friendly the dictionary should be.  In planning my future 
Micmac dictionary, I hope to be able to make it available online with 
different 'buttons' for different users, including different orthographies, 
if that issue hasn't settled out by then, as well as, I now see, for users 
with different degrees of knowledge about dictionaries as such. In fact, in 
dictionaries in general, there are very few really user-friendly ones, 
especially if we take into consideration the fact that *very* few people 
(and this includes me and probably most of us) read very carefully prefatory 
and explanatory material in dictionaries, a task which is often quite 
rewarding, actually.  This won't stop me from putting a probably grizzlily 
long introductory explanatory preface, but I won't harbor too many illusions 
about its impact. 

The other comment is about the mechanics of the list.  From a comment of 
yours and vague recollections, you may be the list 'monitor'.  In any case, 
take a look at my 'subject' line.  I think it is important that all messages 
on this list should go out with this or a similar (?maybe in small letters?) 
prefix, so as to clearly distinguish it from that hated and 
too-easily-deleted spam. 

Comparison: [ALGONQDICT] relative roots
           [algonqdict] relative roots 

Of course, I recognize all the names in this thread so far, but new people 
can always come in to the group, and I'd be likely to just eliminate their 
messages semi-automatically.  The prefix should be an easy change to 
implement; if for some reason it isn't, most ITs should be able to guide you 
(or the pertinent person) in how to do it. 

Jim 


Monica Macaulay escribió: 

> Posoh fellow dictionary makers... 
> 
> We're currently going through the archaic English words that  Bloomfield 
> used in his Menominee lexicon and trying to come up with  more colloquial 
> defintions.  While thinking about 'thus' and what we  could replace it 
> with, I realized that there's an intersecting  problem, which is due to 
> the fact that all of the verbs that have  'thus' in their definition - not 
> surprisingly - have the relative  root aeN- in them.  We were going to 
> change 'thus' to 'in that  manner' but it occurs to me that that might be 
> interpreted as a  complete definition.  So, take the verb that Bloomfield 
> translates as  'it glows thus' - we could change it to 'it glows in that 
> manner' but  a dictionary user might not realize that it's a verb that 
> needs a  manner adverb - and that using it without one would actually be  
> ungrammatical to a native speaker.  Conversely they might not realize  how 
> to translate it in a sentence; i.e. if you used this verb with  'brightly' 
> the meaning would be 'it glows brightly' - NOT 'it glows  brightly in that 
> manner' or something like that.  Have any of you  wrestled with this one 
> and come up with a good solution? 
> 
> A related issue of course is how much info one puts into a dictionary  
> without crossing over the line into being a grammar.  I think we  probably 
> are all making somewhat different decisions about where to  draw that 
> line, and I haven't decided yet where it would be drawn in  a case like 
> this. 
> 
> - Monica
... 


James L. Fidelholtz
Posgrado en Ciencias del Lenguaje, ICSyH
Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla     MÉXICO