Fwd: relative roots

[Monica Macaulay]

I got this very helpful message from David Costa and since it just  
came to me am taking the liberty of forwarding it to the list.  I  
think the list is set up so that replies just go to the sender and  
not the list, which is silly.  I'll check into changing that.

- Monica

Begin forwarded message:

> From: David Costa <pankihtamwa at earthlink.net>
> Date: April 18, 2006 3:06:48 PM CDT
> To: Monica Macaulay <mmacaula at WISC.EDU>
> Cc: Daryl Baldwin <baldwidw at muohio.edu>
> Subject: Re: relative roots
>
> Monica:
>
>> We're currently going through the archaic English words that   
>> Bloomfield used
>> in his Menominee lexicon and trying to come up with  more colloquial
>> defintions.  While thinking about 'thus' and what we  could  
>> replace it with, I
>> realized that there's an intersecting  problem, which is due to  
>> the fact that
>> all of the verbs that have  'thus' in their definition - not  
>> surprisingly -
>> have the relative  root aeN- in them.  We were going to change  
>> 'thus' to 'in
>> that  manner' but it occurs to me that that might be interpreted as a
>> complete definition.  So, take the verb that Bloomfield translates  
>> as  'it
>> glows thus' - we could change it to 'it glows in that manner' but  a
>> dictionary user might not realize that it's a verb that needs a   
>> manner adverb
>> - and that using it without one would actually be  ungrammatical  
>> to a native
>> speaker.  Conversely they might not realize  how to translate it in a
>> sentence; i.e. if you used this verb with  'brightly' the meaning  
>> would be 'it
>> glows brightly' - NOT 'it glows  brightly in that manner' or  
>> something like
>> that.  Have any of you  wrestled with this one and come up with a  
>> good
>> solution?
>>
> Well, it seems to me that the 'thus'/'in that manner' dilemma and  
> the worry
> about people thinking the gloss is a complete definition are separate
> issues. In our Miami dictionary, we used 'thus' a lot, but I think  
> that was
> just because it's all over the Algonquian literature that way and  
> we're so
> used to it. Perhaps in retrospect '(in) that way' or 'so' might  
> have been a
> bit more user-friendly since 'thus' is such a marginal word in  
> modern spoken
> English.
>
>> A related issue of course is how much info one puts into a  
>> dictionary  without
>> crossing over the line into being a grammar.  I think we  probably  
>> are all
>> making somewhat different decisions about where to  draw that  
>> line, and I
>> haven't decided yet where it would be drawn in  a case like this.
>>
> And this is the second issue! I think the problem of speakers not  
> knowing
> exactly how to use a word grammatically just based on its dictionary
> definition is just unavoidable. In my opinion, at the most one  
> could write
> 'relative root' in the gloss along with the form class, then in the  
> intro
> refer the user to a grammatical sketch somewhere; or one could  
> explain in
> the intro that when a word has that prefix and 'thus' (or 'in that  
> manner',
> or whatever) in its gloss, here's what it means, and see the  
> grammatical
> sketch. Explaining the details of how to use a relative root ninety
> different times in a dictionary would just drive people crazy, and  
> they'd
> just have to refer to the grammar anyway.
>
> I've encountered people (not Miamis!) who want Native American  
> languages to
> be spelled just like English, so that they supposedly won't have to  
> learn
> any pronunciation rules. When one learns any new language, one has  
> to master
> that language's spelling and pronunciation idiosyncracies, and one  
> does not
> have the right to expect the rules to be the same as English.  
> Grammar is
> the same way -- I've also had people (again, not Miamis) ask "can't  
> we learn
> this language without any grammar?" The answer is no, of course --
> Algonquian grammar is SO different from English grammar, anyone who  
> wants to
> make meaningful use of an Algonquian dictionary is going to have to
> familiarize themselves with a certain amount of grammar. Using a  
> dictionary
> of Spanish or Polish or Swahili would be the same way. And you can't
> make grammar totally transparent in a dictionary.
>
> Anyway, I hope these comments are useful.
>
> Dave
>
>
>
>
>

Monica Macaulay
Department of Linguistics
University of Wisconsin
1168 Van Hise Hall; 1220 Linden Drive
Madison, WI  53706
phone (608) 262-2292; fax (608) 265-3193
http://ling.wisc.edu/~macaulay/monica.html



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