[Lexicog] English homonyms

[Ron Moe]

Your concerns are well taken. Several people have recommended that we do
user research to determine what most users want and need in a dictionary. If
no one except linguists use the pronunciation guide, then my claim is
certainly exaggerated. But I would want some survey data to base the
decision on.

One reason to include tone, even in a monolingual dictionary, is to raise
people's awareness of the features of their language. I've had the
surprising experience of finding African MA linguistics students who did not
know what tone was nor whether their mother tongue was tonal. It didn't take
much time to determine that their mother tongues were tonal and they soon
caught on to the concept. One reason why there is so much resistance to
writing tone in Africa is that people simply don't understand what it is.
(There are other reasons as well.) So marking it in a dictionary helps them
to realize that it is a part of their language. For those languages where
people have difficulty reading when tone is not marked, it is important that
they begin to accept it as part of their language and realize its importance
in literacy. Having said that, I will grant your point that mother tongue
speakers already know what the tone of a word is and don't need it marked.
The same could be said of English stress, yet most dictionaries mark it. I
will admit that I never look at the stress except perhaps upon the rare
occassion where there is a dialectal difference. I guess I lean toward
including this kind of information on the chance that some user does need
it.

Ron Moe

-----Original Message-----
From: Thapelo Otlogetswe [mailto:thaps at yahoo.com]
Sent: Tuesday, April 27, 2004 11:30 PM
To: lexicographylist at yahoogroups.com
Subject: RE: [Lexicog] English homonyms


> Language learners need a pronunciation
> guide unless the orthography is fully phonemic (and
> I don't know one that
> is).

I don't know how accurate this claim is. By "language
learners" do you mean 'learners of a different
language' as in a Zulu child learning English, or you
refer to persons who learn their own language? The
challenges are certainly different. As far as I know
even when I learnt the English language, I never used
any of the phonemic transcriptions in a dictionary.
Many language teachers themselves could not read
phonemic transcription and did not attempt to teach
them to students. I only could phonemic transcriptions
as an linguistics undergraduate. I can boldly say that
most of the phonemic entries in many dictionaries for
learners of English are never used by both learners
and the teachers of English.

> So a tonal language must mark tone in the
> dictionary. It is a cop out
> to say, "Our orthography doesn't mark it, so we
> won't in the dictionary."
> The only exception would be if tone was only
> grammatical and not lexical.

It depends on which dictionary you refer to [whether
bilingual or monolingual] and to which purpose it has
been compiled. Foreign learners of a tonal language
may indeed be keen on finding out tone in a
dictionary. But for Zulu speakers who are learning
their language, such information may not be crucial
and the dictionary writers who are trying to preserve
space may strongly feel there isn't a strong case for
including tonal marks.


=====
Thapelo Otlogetswe
Information Technology Research Institute
University of Brighton
Lewes Road, Brighton
BN2 4GJ, England
Tel: (+44) 1273 642912 (office)
      (+44) 1273 642908 (fax)
http://www.itri.brighton.ac.uk/~Thapelo.Otlogetswe/







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