[Lexicog] Citation forms in Prefixing Languages

[Wayne Leman]

Ouch! That hurts, John!  :-)

We have some of the same indexing issues in Algonquian languages, John, and
I know that Athabaskanists have struggled with dictionary indexing as well.
As we in Montana work on yet another Cheyenne dictionary I feel that we
really should be doing more fieldtesting to try to determine what is most
user-friendly for the most number of Cheyenne speakers. In case anyone asks,
"Why not do it, then?" I can partially reply that it's not easy to do such
testing in some situations.

I read one or two website articles (and perhaps posted them to the Links
section of this list's website) about a program for comparing dictionary
formats of African languages with native speakers, testing to see which
formats they preferred. I'm glad to see that there is some empirical data
entering the formatting/indexing process.

I'm glad that the Frawley/Hill/Munro collection of articles (Making
Dictionarires: Preserving Indigenous Languages of the Americas) has some
good space devoted to these practical issues. We linguists can no longer
determine format; we really need to be working with the indigenous
communities. I would enjoy a good amount of further discussion on this
matter here on this list.

Wayne
-----
Wayne Leman
Busby, Montana, U.S.A.
Cheyenne dictionary project:
http://www.geocities.com/cheyenne_language/cddicy.htm

> On Mon, 19 Jan 2004, Chinedu Uchechukwu wrote:
>
> > Ron, John and Rhodes,
> > I found your discussion has been very interesting, as it touches on
> > some of the issues that I am presently preoccupied with. ...
>
> Ron's response to Chinedu's (if that would be appropriate) interesting
> exegesis is more to the point than anything I could provide, but these are
> both serious difficulties, and they do affect compilers of Siouan
> dictionaries, though not so seriously as in Igbo.  In Siouan languages
> there are usually very limited numbers of quite productive derivational
> prefixes, and so, if we alphabetize from the left (which we do), there is
> a remarkable pile up under certain letter sequences.

<snip>

>
> Siouan languages lack infinitives or infinitive marking, and the citation
> forms used are mainly the bare stem, which is an unadorned third person
> singular and/or an imperative.  Unfortunately, the least marked form of
> the third person (in contextual terms) sometimes requires an enclitic, and
> the imperative usually does, too.  However, bare forms do occur in
> subordinated syntactic contexts.  In my rather limited experience,
> speakers of a language are less happy with citation forms that cannot
> stand alone as a surface form in fairly unmarked context.  Even when these
> work remarkably better than any of the available surface forms.
>
<snip>

>
> JEK
John Koontz




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