[Lexicog] increasing vocabulary entries

[Wayne Leman]

Good ideas, Pam. A couple other things I have found helpful are:

(1) the obvious, lots of listening to native speakers--the Cheyennes know
that I enjoy hearing a new word and often will ask me if I have heard some
word. I've even made a game out of it and in some contexts paid $1.00 (U.S.)
for any new word I hear. It's fun for all of us.

(2) for those of us who work with polysynthetic languages (Cheyenne is one)
with word slots for instrumentals, body parts, aspect, etc., it can be
productive to generate many combinations of full word possibilities.
Sometimes we in the Cheyenne dictionary project come upon a full word which
we have not heard before, using this technique. Also, as Bob Rankin
mentioned in an earlier message, some of the new combinations have
unexpected semantics, metaphorical or some other kind of semantic extension.
Such words definitely deserve a place in a dictionary. It shouldn't be very
difficult for a computer program to generate thousands of combinations as
the various morphemes for the word slots are varied.

Wayne
-----
Wayne Leman
http://www.geocities.com/cheyenne_language
  The techniques Wayne mentioned for increasing vocabulary are certainly
  the classics. The semantic association technique can be especially good
  when working with a group (as Joe Grimes has observed) -- for example,
  whenever my Zapotec collaborator and I go to visit the cabildo (village
  council) in his town, we come prepared with a few interesting questions
  (e.g. "tell us about types of witches") to stimulate discussion among
  these old men.

  I can suggest three others that I have found helpful.

  -- Going through dictionaries or wordlists of related languages with
  speakers. This of course produces results that are of special value to
  comparativists, but it must be done with care, since words often mean
  different things in the language you are studying than they did in the
  stimulus language.

  -- Translation projects. Translating anything, particularly things that
  a community or the speaker will find interesting and useful (the United
  Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Bible stories,
  traditional stories previously recorded only in English, songs) often
  brings up new words and constructions that might not appear in
  volunteered texts.

  -- Excursions away from the usual workplace. This is especially useful
  for finding names for plants, though of course these are hard for most
  of us without training to identify accurately.

  Pam

  --
  ----
  Pamela Munro
  Professor, Department of Linguistics, UCLA
  UCLA Box 951543
  Los Angeles, CA 90095-1543 USA
  http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/humnet/linguistics/people/munro/munro.htm


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