Manhart editing

De Reuse, Willem WillemDeReuse at MY.UNT.EDU
Sat Sep 24 18:43:47 UTC 2011


My two cents regarding all this are in my review of this second edition, in IJAL Vol. 70, Number 2, April 2004.

Willem de Reuse
________________________________________
From: Siouan Linguistics [SIOUAN at listserv.unl.edu] on behalf of shokooh Ingham [shokoohbanou at YAHOO.CO.UK]
Sent: Saturday, September 24, 2011 1:03 PM
To: SIOUAN at listserv.unl.edu
Subject: Re: Manhart editing (Lakota=>Siouan polyandry inquiry)

Yes. I can see that point Jan. I suppose the idea of republishing was to make a more visually readable dictionary using modern technology.  Buechel/Manhart's use of dots and commas to mark the plain and aspirated consonants is very difficult to see in the small print and the second edition doesn't make it any easier, but I would be interested to know how much of the data you consider to be inaccurate.  There are words which look dubious to put it mildly, purely because of their morphology and most learners with a reasonable basis in the language will have had their doubts about these items, but is there really that much wrong with it? Percentage wise how much would you say?
Bruce

--- On Sat, 24/9/11, Jan Ullrich <jfu at LAKHOTA.ORG> wrote:

> From: Jan Ullrich <jfu at LAKHOTA.ORG>
> Subject: Re: Manhart editing (Lakota=>Siouan polyandry inquiry)
> To: SIOUAN at listserv.unl.edu
> Date: Saturday, 24 September, 2011, 17:29
> > De mortuis non nisi bonum.
>
>
> Right!
> My comment was more about the alive who made the decision
> to entrust Manhardt with the second edition, especially at
> his advanced age.
>
> > We shouldn't forget that Manhardt seems to have put a
> lot of effort into
> > that work with the meager facilities that he had, also
> re-editing it at an
> > advanced age; and it was, after all, the only thing
> around for a long time.
> > I couldn't have learnt Lakota without it.
>
> This was not to dismiss Manhardt's contribution in making
> the first edition available to the public! I was mainly
> referring to the decision to re-publish the dictionary in
> the way it was done, i.e. without even the slightest attempt
> to make corrections based on research (with speakers or from
> texts). The problem of the Buechel manuscript is not that it
> doesn't include valuable data, but that without much
> research it is impossible to tell which parts of the data
> are reliable and which are not (e.g. entries and definitions
> borrowed from unreliable or non-Lakota sources, like Riggs,
> or sentences originating in non-idiomatic translations of
> liturgical texts etc.). Of course, no dictionary is perfect,
> but in this dictionary the problematic data constitutes a
> major proportion.
> So, much of the learning from the dictionary inevitably
> involves un-learning the incorrect stuff, if one is able to
> figure out which parts are incorrect.
>
> Jan
>



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