[Lexicog] polysynthetic languages and dictionaries

[William J Poser]

Ah, I see. Yes, if you can't spell correctly using a parser could
be a problem. I know that there is work on using finite state machines
for spelling correction, which might help, but I'm not familiar with it.
I think that Mike Maxwell may know about this, but he's still out of
town and probably not reading this list. There is an approximate
version of grep, the Unix regular expression matching program,
called "agrep", which let's you say "give me everything that either
matches exactly or deviates only in N places". An MS Windows version
is available. See: http://www.tgries.de/agrep/. It might be worth
playing with this to see how well such methods work.

I do wonder why native speakers are an important "market" for
a dictionary of Cheyenne. In the case of Carrier, the people who would
actually use a dictionary would be primarily language learners or
linguists, and secondarily other people, such as biologists or
anthropologists, who occasionally want to know what something means.
The native speakers already know the language and so don't need the
dictionary. I suppose that it would be useful for semi-speakers, whose
vocabulary is limited, but still, I don't think of native speakers
as users of the dictionaries. In the case of Cheyenne, is it that
the native speakers use the dictionary to check their spelling?

Bill



--
Bill Poser, Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania
http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~wjposer/ billposer at alum.mit.edu


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