[Lexicog] Re: Citation forms in Prefixing Languages

Wed Jan 21 03:04:28 UTC 2004

Howdy folks,

>Lest there be any doubt, I agree with Ron (and others): there is no good
>solution for printed dictionaries (although for prefixing languages,
>alphabetizing from the end of the word would not be impossible).

I guess I'd want to be a little more optomistic than that.  Having worked 
on dictionary projects for both Iroquoian and Athabaskan languages, I've 
been struggling with this very issue of prefixing for a while, and I've 
enjoyed and appreciated the discussion it has generated here.

In the Iroquoian verb template, you basically have two types of prefixes: 
pronominal prefixes (around 60 of them), occurring immediately before the 
verb stem, and prepronominal prefixes (modal, directional, negative, and 
others) occuring before the pronominal prefix.  If you look at the most 
recent series of Iroquoian dictionaries to come out -- for Oneida (by 
Michelson et. al.), Onondaga (by Woodbury) and Cayuga (by Dyck et. al.), 
all published in the last year or two by U of Toronto Press -- they tackle 
the prefixing problem by exploiting this functional/positional difference.

They list as headwords each of the combinations of prepronominal prefixes 
(there's around 120 of them, depending on the language).  For example, 
here's an entry from the Onondaga dictionary (p. 359):

[ë here stands for a nasal-e written as e + nasal hook in the printed version]

===============

dës-/dëj-/dëji-/dët-  prepronominal prefix: dualic, future mode, and 
repetitive.
Note: The alternant dëj- occurs before pronominal prefixes beginning in y; 
dëji- occurs before first person inclusive dual and plural agent prefixes, 
second person dual and plural prefixes, and the second person singular 
patient prefix; dët- occurs before the second person agent pronominal 
prefix -hs- and before pronominal prefixes beginning in s, other than those 
taking the dëji- alternant; dës- occurs elsewhere.

================

[Just as an aside, while the Proto-Athabaskans may have mastered the art of 
making their language inscrutable to outsiders, the Proto-Iroquois were 
clearly no slouches in this department, neither...]

So, what we have here is a headword which is neither a single 
morpheme/prefix, nor is it a whole word... rather, it's just a "useful, 
recurring chunk".  If a user was trying to identify a word that happened to 
start with that particular combination of prepronominal prefixes, they're 
able to get that whole chunk at once, instead of having to look up d- for 
the Dualic prefix, ë- for the Future mode prefix, and s-/j-/ji-/t- for the 
Repetitive prefix.

Once they've managed to strip off that prepronominal chunk, they can move 
on to the pronominal prefixes, which have entries that look like the following:

================

ethi-/ethiy-/-yethi-/-yethiy-  pronominal prefix.
Note: First person inclusive non-singular acting on third person 
feminine-indefinite singular, or third person feminine-zoic or masculine 
non-singular, interactive pronominal prefix: we (you and I, two or more) 
act on her, or somebody, or them.  The alternants ethi-/ethiy- occur 
word-initially or medially after ? [glottal stop], -yehti-/-yethiy- occur 
medially in remaining environments.  The alternants ethi-/-yethi- occur 
with bases that begin in consonants including R, or with bases that begin 
in the vowel i, with the loss of the i, ethiy-/-yethiy- occur with bases 
that begin in a, e, ë, o or u.

================

Once the user has stripped that off, they then have a shot at finding the 
main verb entry... and so long as it doesn't start with one of those 
vanishing-i's or an R (a reconstructed proto-consonant slot filler that 
Iroquoianists are fond of using, and which is cogante with an 
actually-occuring /r/ in Mohawk).

Now, clearly, this is still a pretty complex system, and it's hard to 
imagine that an untrained speaker/learner would be able to use it easily -- 
although, to be fair, they were not the primary intended audience of these 
dictionarires.  For them, a better solution might be to treat the whole 
prefix string, prepronominal and pronominal together, as an entry, which 
might look something like this:

================

dëjyethi-/dëjyethiy-  prefix string.
Note: Dualic, future mode, and repetitive prepronominal prefixes, plus 
first person inclusive non-singular acting on third person 
feminine-indefinite singular, or third person feminine-zoic or masculine 
non-singular, interactive pronominal prefix: we (you and I, two or more) 
act on her, or somebody, or them.  The alternant dëjyethi- occur with bases 
that begin in consonants including R, or with bases that begin in the vowel 
i, with the loss of the i, dëjyethiy- occur with bases that begin in a, e, 
ë, o or u.

================

The obvious drawback to this, however, is that there are thousands and 
thousands of these strings, which would take up a lot of space in a printed 
dictionary... although the rather verbose entries exemplified above could 
certainly be streamlined with a judicial use of abbrevations.

Young and Morgan took a similar sort of approach in their "Big Blue" Navajo 
dictionary  from 1987.  Verbs in this dictionary are not listed by root as 
they are in most other big Athabskan dictionaries, but instead by the third 
person singular Imperfective (I) form.  This is followed by the third 
person singular Iterative (R), Perfective (P), Future (F) and Optative (O) 
forms of the verb -- so, in a sense, each verb entry has five 
headwords!  For example [using umlauts for nasal vowels and circumflexes 
for high-tone nasal vowels]:

================

ch'éhébääs (I), ch'ínáhábäs (R), ch'íheezbââz (P), ch'íhidoobäs (F), 
ch'íhóbääs (O), biL --, to ride out (horizontally) one after another, to be 
brought out one load after another (as passengers, in wheeled 
vehicles).  Tó yíläädgo 'áLchíní tsékoohdêê' tsinaabääs biL ch'ídahaazbââz, 
when the flood came the children were brought out of the canyon one (load) 
after another by wagon. (*0bääs: to move by rolling -- a hooplike object.) 
(ch'éhi-)

================

At the end of the entry, in parentheses, is a cross-reference to the entry 
for ch'éhi-:

================

ch'éhi- (ch'íhi-): ch'í-, Pos. IVb, out horizontally + -hi-/yi-, Pos VIa-c, 
seriative, one after another.

================

This is then followed by a *large* table (16x5) showing all the different 
prefix strings one can get by interdigitating the inflectional person and 
mode prefixes into the lexical/derivational prefix string ch'éhi-.  So, for 
instance, it shows the different first person singular prefix strings based 
on ch'éhi-, one for each of the five modes:

Imperfective: ch'éhésh-
Iterative: ch'ínáhásh-
Perfective: ch'éhé-
Future: ch'íhideesh-
Optative: ch'íhósh-

A quick scan of the table shows that, in fact, ch'éhi- itself is not an 
occurring surface string... there's always some inflectional prefix or 
other that changes that string into something else.  So, ch'éhi- is in fact 
just a label for the table that holds all these related fully-inflected 
prefix strings.

But in practice that actually works out pretty well.  For instance, if you 
wanted to take make the first person dual imperfective form of this verb, 
you could take the third person singular citation form given as a headword, 
ch'éhébääs, strip off the prefix string (everything but the last syllable, 
which is the verb root/stem), and then replace it with the first person 
dual imperfective prefix string found in the table, giving you ch'íhiibääs.

During my time at Navajo Community College (now Diné College), I remember 
talking with several of the Navajo language instructors, and they all 
preferred the way verbs were treated in the Big Blue dictionary, compared 
to the Big Red analytical dictionary where all the verbs were listed by 
root.  Even though verb roots/stems are quite easy to identify in 
Athabaskan (much much more so than in Iroquoian), these speakers and 
teachers appreciated having actual words as headwords... to them, it seemed 
more like what a dictionary is supposed to be like.

Although the system used in the Big Blue dictionary is "better", it still 
has its shortcomings.  For instance, if a student were reading along and 
came across the word ch'íhiibääs, he would have to do some hunting in order 
to figure out what that verb means, since the inflected prefix string 
ch'íhii- is not listed as a headword of its own -- it only occurs as part 
of the table of inflected strings under the entry for ch'éhi-.  Given that 
Young and Morgan have already done all the work of listing what the 
inflected prefix strings are, it seems like it wouldn't be that hard to 
make a separate index of all those strings and what they decompose to.... 
though again, as for Iroquoian, we're talking about thousands and thousands 
of strings

So, in the end, lexicographers have come up with some pretty effective ways 
of dealing with all this pesky prefixing, but it requires one to look 
beyond listing just individual morphemes or whole words as headwords, and 
to include the possibility of listing prefix strings, whether 
actually-occurring ones as in Iroquoian, or somewhat abstracted ones, as in 
Navajo.

===
Jordan Lachler
Sealaska Heritage Institute

Yahoo! Groups Links

To visit your group on the web, go to:
 http://groups.yahoo.com/group/lexicographylist/

To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
 lexicographylist-unsubscribe at yahoogroups.com

Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
 http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ 