[Lexicog] polysynthetic languages and dictionaries

[William J Poser]

Ken is right that Athabaskan languages are not polysynthetic in the
sense in which some languages are, that is, they do not routinely
incorporate nouns. They do incorporate some nouns, but only a limited
subset. More frequently, they incorporate postpositions.
However, for the purpose of the present discussion of dictionary
lookup I'm not sure that this is an important distinction.
So long as a language has a lot of forms that are not transparent
to someone without a lot of analytic knowledge of the language,
the same problem arises.

As for the spelling of Athabaskan, I myself don't care whether it
is spelled with a <k> or a <c>. My fingers seem to have settled on <k>,
but <c> doesn't bother me and I offer no particular justification
for my fingers' choice of <k>. On the other hand, I object strongly
to <p> rather than <b>. The word is always pronounced with [b],
so writing it <p> is just confusing in English and occasionally
gives rise to the erroneous spelling pronounciation with a [p]
The reason for writing <p> is that the word is borrowed from Cree,
in which it is written <p>. But Cree, unlike English, is a language
with no [p]/[b] contrast.  I find it very silly to write the
English word according to conventions based on the sound system
of Cree.

Bill

--
Bill Poser, Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania
http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~wjposer/ billposer at alum.mit.edu


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