[Lexicog] Sort Order for Lakota language

[Jan F. Ullrich]

Dear Mellisa Axelrod and Bill Poser

Thank you for your replies to my query about sort order for Lakota language
dictionary.
We are still quite far from the publishing phase so there is time for us to
think this through. 

I have always been inclined to sorting by digraphs as units (option (B) in
my previous post), but at the same time I acknowledge that sorting by
individual letters (A) might be less problematic from the native speaker's
perspective. Therefore that is going to be my vote. But some of my
colleagues and co-workers feel strongly about option (C), that is treating
<h>-aspiration as a diacritic and ignoring it in sort order. One of the
reasons I posted on this was that I hoped to find more arguments against
this option.

My colleagues main reasoning is that native speakers will find words exactly
where they look for them and that having similar words close to each other
will enable the speakers realize the need to write them differently. As in
the following cases:

thoka - enemy
tokha - something is the matter

kiza - to squeek
khiza - to fight

kan - old
khan - vein

In any other sort order the words will be far apart.


> If the preferred sort order differs from what older speakers are used to
> you might consider producing two versions of the dictionary and letting 
> people choose. Technologically this is now trivial and need not 
> have much impact on cost.

I think this approach would be contra productive with regard to orthography
standardization.
And although it would be easy to do technologically, the impact on cost
would be substantial (we are talking about a language with relatively little
literary tradition and little economic potential in the publishing
industry).
Not to mention that most of the regular (non-linguist) dictionary users
probably wouldn't be able to tell one version of the dictionary from the
other just by reading some note or instruction on the cover, because the
fact is that there is no previous standard for sort order (at least not a
consistent one).

Best

Jan


Jan F. Ullrich
Lakota Language Consortium
www.lakhota.org
e-mail: jfu at lakhota.org





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