[Lexicog] Field research based dictionaries

[Masha Brykina]

Hello all,

I am a new member of this group and would like to ask for help. I am involved in a project aimed to make a Besermyan-Russian dictionary (Besermyan is considered to be one of dialects of Udmurt - a Finno-Ugric language). This dictionary will be based on field research. Until now we’ve collected over 3000 basic lexemes with some examples, which we have organized in a database made in Microsoft Access. During our work we were confronted with certain problems and would like to learn more about these points (perhaps you could provide some references):

1)      Whether anyone has experience using MS Access for such goals.

2)      What are the basic principles of separating meanings of the word

3)      How one should deal with loan words (there are lots of words from Russian more or less phonetically assimilated (for example, the names of the months – russian ones are wide-spread and the original ones are remembered only by several aged speakers)).

4)      Whether there are any works on principles of making alphabets. For example, we have problems with shwa-sound. There are several variants of this sound, which don’t seem to be phonological, but which are easily distinguished by the native speakers. And since Besermyan differs phonetically from Udmurt and therefore can be seen as having no writing system, one more problem arises – how to choose lexical entry in case there are several phonetic variants for one lexeme.



We would be very grateful for any information concerning these problems.



Masha.



Maria Brykina

Student

Department of Linguistics

Moscow State University

mailto:marik_bryk at yahoo.com


		
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