[Lexicog] part of speech in E-V

Fri Mar 23 20:50:48 UTC 2007

None of your three options is really very good. Your first example:

black adj. sapa

is OK in that it follows the normal convention of (1) headword, (2) part of
speech of headword, (3) description of headword. But it has numerous
problems as I describe below. Your second example:

black vs. sapa

violates the convention for dictionaries. Your third example:

black adj. sapa vs.

would only work if you maintain a simple list of one-word equivalents. As
soon as you start adding other information, this system breaks down. I’ll
explain and illustrate the problem below.

What you do with your English-Lakota section will be determined by what you
think your users will want and need. If they need to look up an English word
in order to find the equivalent Lakota word, then all they need is a finder
list. If they want to understand an English word and need a description of
it in Lakota, then they need a full description of the English word,
including the part of speech of the English word. Since a good definition
would require more than a single Lakota word, there is no point in trying to
provide a part of speech for the Lakota word.

Sometimes there are words in two languages that are rough synonyms. In this
case it is possible to produce a list of equivalents in the two languages
such as your example:

black adj. sapa vs.

It is easy to reverse this in order to produce a mirror image:

sapa vs. black adj.

But this is far from being a dictionary. It is what we would call a glossed
word list. There is nothing wrong with a glossed word list. But it is of
very limited value. There are two serious problems with such a list of
lexical equivalents: (1) Sometimes there is no one-word equivalent in the
other language. (2) Most people want more information. If they want
information about a Lakota word, it may be helpful to point out that the
part of speech of ‘sapa’ (for instance) is different than the equivalent
word ‘black’ in English. Most lexicographers don’t bother to point out the
differences between the head word and its (English) gloss. The assumption is
that there are lots of differences in form (obviously), grammatical
function, and semantics. So most lexicographers focus on simply describing
the head word.

In a finder list we aren’t just giving a list of English words, nor are we
giving a list of glosses of the vernacular words. Instead we are trying to
help the user find vernacular words. So we sometimes need to give a very
brief definition of the vernacular word so the user will know if that’s the
word he is looking for. Sometimes a one-word gloss will be sufficient:

black  sapa

But sometimes a phrase is better:

black, to be  sapa

In this case ‘black, to be’ doesn’t have a part of speech. So a finder list
entry such as the following doesn’t make any sense:

*black, to be  adj.  sapa

So most lexicographers just leave the part of speech out of a finder list.
Sometimes a single English word will have more than one equivalent in the
vernacular. A simple format is to merely list the Lakota words:

black sapa; (another Lakota word); (another Lakota word)

But this doesn’t tell the user what the difference is between the Lakota
words. So we might want to create multiple subentries under a single English
word.

black

            black (adj.) sapa

            black (n.), the color black (Lakota word)

            black (v.), to black sth. (Lakota word)

In this example the part of speech is merely part of our effort to indicate
the different senses of the English word so that the user knows which
equivalent Lakota word to look up. So we are trying to match senses of the
English word to particular Lakota words. However it might be better for our
English “definitions” to reflect the meaning of the Lakota words rather than
the senses of the English word:

black

            black, to be  sapa

            black and white spotted (Lakota word)

            black, to color sth black (Lakota word)

In contrast, a true English-Lakota dictionary would list ‘black’ as a head
word and describe it in Lakota. You might give a full definition of ‘black’
in Lakota followed by an equivalent gloss in Lakota:

black  adj.  (definition in Lakota); sapa.

If the headword has more than one sense with different parts of speech and
you try to indicate the part of speech of the Lakota gloss, this can get
very confusing. For instance ‘black’ is an adjective, noun, and transitive
verb in English:

black 1. adj. (definition in Lakota); sapa vs. We have a black cat. 2. n.
(definition in Lakota); sapa vs. He uses a lot of black in his paintings. 3.
vt. (definition in Lakota); sapa vs. You should use this polish to black
your shoes.

So the best way to keep things simple is to give the part of speech of
English words in the English-Lakota section, and give the part of speech of
the Lakota words in the Lakota-English section.

Ron Moe

   _____  

From: lexicographylist at yahoogroups.com
[mailto:lexicographylist at yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of Jan F. Ullrich
Sent: Friday, March 23, 2007 6:11 AM
To: lexicographylist at yahoogroups.com;
ShoeboxToolbox-Field-Linguists-Toolbox at googlegroups.com
Subject: [Lexicog] part of speech in E-V

Dear lexicographers and Toolboxers

I would like to ask about your opinions and experiences in marking part of
speech in English-Vernacular dictionaries.

In our current work on a dictionary of the Lakota language we would like to
create not only the Lakota-English section, but also English-Lakota section.
Instead of using the index export file option of Toolbox, we have created a
separate Toolbox database.

In doing so we find it difficult to deal with the part of speech field in
the E-Lakota section.

First of all, it is not entirely clear to me from the MDF description if the
\ps field is designed for the English lexeme, or for the vernacular (Lakota)
equivalent. 

>From the perspective of what we want from our English-Lakota dictionary, we
think that it is better to mark the part of speech of the Lakota word. 

An example:

black adj. sapa

(here the ps marks the English lexeme, not the Lakota equivalent which is
actually a stative verb)

black vs. sapa

(here the ps refers to the Lakota word)

an alternative would be:

black adj. sapa vs.

But I don’t know if this is possible to do in Toolbox and not sure if it is
a desired solution because it could become very complex in entries where
both English and Lakota words are of multiple part of speech.

I would be interested to know how others dealt with the part of speech of
English-Vernacular dictionaries.

Jan

Jan Ullrich

Lakota Language Consortium 

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