Book Reviews On-line: Making Dictionaries (fwd)

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http://www.aaanet.org/aes/bkreviews/result_details.cfm?bk_id=1710

American Ethnologist Volume 30 Number 3 August 2003
posted September 2003

Book Reviews On-line

Making Dictionaries: Preserving Indigenous Languages of the Americas.
William Frawley, Kenneth C. Hill, and Pamela Munro, eds.. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2002. vi + 449pp. , list of
contributors, bibliography, index.

Nora C. England
University of Texas at Austin

This collection of 16 essays and a lengthy introduction by the editors
covers a lot of territory, from form and meaning in dictionaries, the
role of dictionaries in indigenous communities, and technology and
dictionary design to specific projects and personal accounts. The
chapter authors are all well known for their work with North and
Central American indigenous languages (no South American languages are
represented here). The editors begin with a thoughtful introduction
that sets forth ten issues related to making dictionaries and the ways
in which the individual chapter authors address them.

These issues include the forms that should be used for headwords; how
linguistic theory should or should not be taken into account in
lexicography; literacy and related topics such as orthographic choice;
the use of graphics of all sorts, including in multimedia dictionaries;
the role of the community of users; how a single dictionary serves
multiple purposes; how much historical information should be included
and where; the benefits of changes in technology in dictionary making;
the challenges of making dictionaries for languages that have no
lexicographic tradition; and the necessity of violating rules of
consistency at some point.

A sampling of the articles immediately whets the appetite for more. Ken
Hill’s chapter (“On Publishing the Hopi Dictionary”) recounts in
fascinating detail how the issues that arose in one community almost
blocked a dictionary’s publication, in spite of the fact that
considerable care was taken from the beginning of the project to secure
full consent of all parties to its publication. Catherine Callaghan
(“Writing a User-Friendly Dictionary”) brings to her chapter the
experience of working on Miwok dictionaries for over 30 years. She
makes a number of recommendations for what to include and how to
present dictionary material, but even more interesting is her reference
to substantial changes that occurred during the period of her research.
One, of course, was the advent of computers, but another was the
realization, after testing the dictionary among speakers of the
language, that the original orthography was incomprehensible simply
because it used too many completely unfamiliar symbols. Paul Kroskrity
(“Language Renewal and the Technologies of Literacy and Postliteracy”)
takes the discussion about technology much further in his description
of the CD-ROM that he and a team produced for Western Mono. Keren Rice
and Leslie Saxon (“Issues of Standardization and Community in
Aboriginal Language Lexicography”) discuss differing approaches to
standardization taken in the preparation of three dictionaries of
Northwest Territories Athasbakan languages (Dogrib, Slave, and Kaska).
The three dictionaries vary between presenting a single well-defined
dialect, a dialect or language with considerable internal diversity,
and wholly different languages. Rice and Saxon’s discussion of the
approaches resulting in the different models lucidly highlights some of
the issues in community decision-making processes that have an impact
on linguistic work.

In fact, one of the several strengths of this book is that the editors
and authors pay particular attention to community issues--especially in
terms of community decision-making, the differences between academic
dictionaries meant primarily for linguists and nonacademic dictionaries
meant primarily for speakers or students, and the roles of dictionaries
in encouraging literacy. The reference in the subtitle of the book to
language preservation suggests that community perspectives should be
included, and they are.

Although lexicography is a field that is represented by a great many
books (unlike, for instance, grammar writing, which is the subject of
few, if any, comprehensive texts), Making Dictionaries is still a very
welcome addition to the field. In it are collected essays about a
particular area of the world that is of considerable interest to
American anthropology and linguistics; the essays are written by
linguists with many years of experience in the field, they are highly
readable, informative, and even entertaining, and the authors take
quite seriously the involvement of the community in the whole
lexicographic process. Even for researchers who have already made their
dictionaries, there is a lot of material for thought, and for those who
have not yet finished, the book is invaluable for raising important and
complex issues. For those anthropologists and linguists who have no
intention of writing a dictionary, the book is still worthwhile reading
for the information it contains about lexical issues and
community–scholar relations.