[Lexicog] sorting of digraphs

[Sebastian Drude]

Dear all,


my impression is that lexicography for minority languages done by
linguists usually follows the advice to keep phonemes as the basis for
sorting, including phonemes represented by bigraphs (e.g., Shoebox manuals
and "Making Dictionaries" suggest that you should follow this method).

(By the way, exactly this relation of orthography and phonology should
provide the basis to introduce a sound notion of "grapheme", which can
consist of sequences of letters.)

In the case of indigenous languages in Latin America, this practice may be
supported by the fact that Spanish also treats the two digraph-phonemes
"ll" and "ch" as separated entities when it comes to alphabetical
ordering.

However, I ever felt that this is an unecessary complication.  I don't
know if there are pragmatic/psycholongusitic studies or systematic studies
of usage of dictionaries around that tested how much extra learning and
mental processing it needs, for instance for the speakers of Spanish, to
follow this rule.  I guess it is a complication; for learners of Spanish
it is awkward at best.

Imagine my native language, German, to be treated this way -- besides from
complications such as that there is even a three-letter grapheme "sch" in
German, there are several analytical difficulties of what sequences of
letters should be considered 'graphemes' defined this way -- candidates
are "ie" for long "i", "V+h" for long vowels in general, "pf", "st"? 
"tz", "ck" and double consonants in general that represent a single
phoneme in ambisyllabic position, etc. etc.

For the ends of linguistic analysis, e.g., formulation of search
conditions, alphabetically treating multigraph graphemes as units on their
own may be useful, but I would suggest that this does not mean that a
dictionary for a speech community which is in the process of becoming a
litterate society should necessarily follow this principle; on the
contrary, I would subscribe to Allans sentence below, which, in the case
of minority languages, is to be taken, however, less as an empirical
statement than as a methodological principle.  So substitute a "should"
for the "usually":

> "Dictionaries
> usually alphabetize letter by letter rather than phoneme by phoneme".

I would like to know if other practicioners of lexicography in this list
agree with my point of view.

All the best,

Sebastian Drude


Literature on this topic for German:

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphemik , there are citations of:

Peter Eisenberg: Die Schreibsilbe im Deutschen, in: Schriftsystem und
Orthografie, hrsg. von P. Eisenberg/H. Günther, Tübingen 1989, S.57-84.

Peter Eisenberg: Linguistische Fundierung orthographischer Regeln, Umrisse
einer Wortgraphematik des Deutschen, in: Homo scribens, hrsg. von Jürgen
Baurmann e.a., Tübingen 1993, S.67-91.

-- 
|   Sebastian   D R U D E         (Lingüista, Projeto Aweti / DOBES)
|   Setor de Lingüística   --  Coordenação de Ciências Humanas (CCH)
|   Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi,  Belém do Pará   --  CNPq  --  MCT
|   Cx.P. 399  --  CEP: 66 040 - 170  --  Tel. e FAX: (91) 274 40 04
|   Email:   sebadru at zedat.fu-berlin.de    +   drude at museu-goeldi.br
|   URL:   http://www.germanistik.fu-berlin.de/il/pers/drude-en.html




 
Yahoo! Groups Links

<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
    http://groups.yahoo.com/group/lexicographylist/

<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
    lexicographylist-unsubscribe at yahoogroups.com

<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
    http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/