[Lexicog] Digest Number 353

[Dick_Watson at GIAL.EDU]

From: Dick Watson <dick_watson at gial.edu
Subject: Re: Digest Number 343

My response to the desire for all wordforms in an electronic dictionary is
that you would have a monstrosity if the language were highly
agglutinating.  You would not only have huge redundancy, you would have
all the work of dealing with each and every entry, deciding how much
information to include in each one, most of which would be redundant, but
forever maintaining all of the additions and corrections to keep up such a
huge database.  Would you limit your wordforms to those actually found in
a corpus or would you also run through paradigms of all possible forms?
The latter would run into all kinds of problems with derivations, many of
which would never occur or would not necessarily have the same meaning as
that predicted, besides the sheer enormity of the task.
It could be more practical to have a separate simple wordform inventory
with links to the roots, stems or citation forms in the dictionary, but
even the maintenance of all those links would keep you from more important
lexicographic tasks, not to mention taking time out to meet your
grandchildren, if there had been time to have children.

Dick
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lexicography/attachments/20050525/a0e017ee/attachment.htm>