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<br><font size=2 face="Courier New">From: Dick Watson <dick_watson@gial.edu<br>
Subject: Re: Digest Number 343</font>
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<br><font size=2 face="Courier New">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.</font>
<br><font size=2 face="Courier New">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.</font>
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<br><font size=2 face="Courier New">Dick</font>
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