[Lexicog] Theoretical constructs vs. practical reference dictionaries

[Mike Maxwell]

Kenneth C. Hill wrote:
> Have you lexicographers for Philippine languages seriously tried
> enthusiastic cross-referencing?
> In the Hopi Dictionary we provide cross-reference entries like
> "amùusa- See corresponding (àa)sa- entry.
> amùu-sa-[them-QNT-]"
> Translated, this means "for any item beginning in "amùusa-",
> one should look under "àasa-".
> ...
> Hopi is basically a suffixing
> language so we didn't have to confront major problems like those
> encountered by Athabaskanists or describers of Philippine languages.

There was some discussion of indexing of partial words on this list a few
weeks ago.

As for prefixing languages, there's no reason in principle a dictionary--or
more likely, some sort of index into the dictionary--couldn't be
alphabetized from right to left.  It adds a step to lookup, but short of a
computerized dictionary with a parsing front end, it might be better than
nothing.

There are further problems with lookup in Athabaskan languages, beyond their
prefixing nature; in particular, what amounts to discontinuous stems (where
inflectional prefixes are interspersed with meaning-changing or -supplying
derivational prefixes), making dictionary lookup in these languages more
than just the mirror image of the problem in your average suffixing
language.  Bill Poser has some papers on this, which again were referred to
a few weeks ago in this forum.

Of course the reverse indexing solution also encounters problems with
languages which have both prefixes and suffixes.

    Mike Maxwell
    LDC
    maxwell at ldc.upenn.edu



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