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<br><font size=2 face="sans-serif">Date: Thursday 19 May 2005</font>
<br><font size=2 face="sans-serif">From "Dick Watson" <dick_watson@sil.org></font>
<br><font size=2 face="sans-serif">Subject: database structure (was Digest Number 343)</font>
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<br><font size=2 face="sans-serif">First, to take up what I think is one of the simpler parts of the topic, I believe we can agree that the content of the "wordform inventory" does not go into the dictionary. It's important for text analysis, generating dictionary entries, and for morphological analysis. It might even be printed out for some purpose, but not as part of a dictionary. (In an isolating language it might even be identical to most dictionary entries, but I don't think that is relevant here.)</font>
<br><font size=2 face="sans-serif">Second, at the price of oversimplifying, I would like to propose an approach to all of the rest of the relationships between lexemes. Rather than entering some words as subentries or minor entries of other words, we should enter all of them as major entries. If we wish to "define" some of them as "see x", we can do that, but we have the choice of giving definitions, parts of speech and whatever else we may see fit. Then, just like we have fields for a variety of lexical relations, we have fields for base entry, subentry and minor entries, etc. In a dictionary presentation/ printout, we might just have all the entries without any of the relationships, or we could choose whichever of the relationships we wanted. These would only be listed under the entry according to the format chosen, but the all of the information specific to linked words would only occur in their own main entry. If a !
person wanted to distinguish between those subentries which they would be more likely to include under a base entry (in addition to their own main entry), their could be provision for two classes of subentry. Likewise with minor entries.</font>
<br><font size=2 face="sans-serif">As Ron stated, a field worker doesn't always know whether something will turn out to be a minor or subentry in the long run. But if he can enter everything as a main entry, it's simple. Then he can create the links whenever he reaches that stage.</font>
<br><font size=2 face="sans-serif">Dick</font>
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