[Lexicog] DDE: Dictionary Database Editor (was: dictionary software)

[David Frank]

On the topic of sorting....

An earlier revision of my Dictionary Database Editor did have a sorting
function, but the present revision seems to have lost that. I'm trying to
remember why. This DDE is not intended to be a one-size-fits-all kind of
thing, and sorting was more important to us early on in our dictionary
project than it was towards the end. After you reach a certain point, it
gets more convenient to place entries where you want them rather than
try to have them sorted automatically. It shouldn't be too hard to do a sort
routine, though, if you can decide on how you want it to sort. The sorting
could be done within the program if I spent a little time trying to work
that out again, or it could be done by another program.

The DDE has a field for an alphabetic key that is supposed to be used for
sorting. Even though the alphabetic key field is still there, we quit paying
much attention to it when we quit trying to do automatic sorting. The
alphabetic key is something I learned from the SIL lexicography wizards
working on Philippine languages in the early to mid 80s. I picked this up at
a dictionary workshop I attended in South America in the latter part of the
80s. The idea is that you have some kind of algorithm for producing an
alphabetic key that can be used for sorting, but the alphabetic key for a
particular entry could be adjusted where necessary. When I say some kind of
algorithm, I mean for example everything is converted to upper case and
accent marks over letters are lost. Keep in mind that this was the technique
nearly 20 years ago, but more sophisticated sorting techniques could be used
nowadays.

But here is a sample of how an alphabetic key is helpful, if you want to do
automatic sorts: Say, for instance, that you have a word "bagay" meaning
"thing", and under the entry for bagay you want to have a subentry "an
bagay" meaning "something." An alphabetic key for "an bagay" of AN BAGAY
would be automatically generated, but you could change that to BAGAY AN so
that it would come after "bagay." This is just a technique that I picked up
in the primitive days of personal computing, but I don't want to defend it
if there are better ways of doing sorting nowadays.

There was a period, though, when the team temporarily switched over to
Shoebox for working on the St. Lucian Creole dictionary, and I didn't like
what happened to the sorting then. We ended up going back to my program, but
that experience caused us some extra work. The main problem I remember was
that the alphabetic keys were lost and Shoebox put things in an order other
than what I had wanted, so we had to go back through and rearrange
everything. (Don't ask how all of this could have happened.) I imagine it
would have been possible to keep the alphabetic keys in Shoebox, and maybe
there would have even been a way to get Shoebox to sort the entries the way
I wanted, but I didn't have the patience or inclination to try to work with
it.

I like the comment I found at the end of the review of Shoebox that I found
at http://faust.linguistics.berkeley.edu/~jcgood/bifocal/ShoeboxRev.html. It
said, "Rumor has it that Shoebox gurus can get the program to do backflips,
however for the average user, there seems to be a steep learning curve." (I
found the link to this on the Yahoo lexicographylist web site.)

-- David Frank




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