[Lexicog] Cheyenne dictionary: the jury's verdict

[Wayne Leman]

This semester I am teaching a course at the reservation college called
Cheyenne Linguistics. Students are fluent speakers of the language, eager to
learn. I have had most of them in classes I have taught in the past. Last
week their home assignment was to work with the current release of our CD
dictionary of Cheyenne. I gave the students a homework sheet with specific
things to try to find in the dictionary. A key part of the homework was for
the students to locate three entries which happened to appear on the same
page of the dictionary, and all of which have the same stem -mésehe meaning
'eat.' This was the first field test of a stem-based Cheyenne dictionary.

The first entry they were to find was the verb émésehe 'he is eating,'
composed of the third person prefix é- plus the verb stem.

The second entry was námésêhétáno 'I want to eat,' composed of the first
person prefix ná-, the verb stem, plus a suffix -táno meaning 'want to.'

The last entry was the noun mésêhéstoto meaning 'potatoes,' composed of the
steam 'eat', a nominalizer -htot and an animate plural suffix -o.

We discussed in class how the students did interacting with the dictionary.
Although all of the students know well the verb prefixes, not one was able
to locate the verbs 'he is eating' and 'I want to eat'. The issue was that
they were trying to locate 'he is eating' by its first letter, the prefix
é-, and 'I want to eat' by its prefix ná-. Each of the verbs they were
looking was clearly listed as subentries under their "headword" verb stem,
but that did not help when they were looking for those verbs under their
pronominal prefixes.

I thanked the students for helping me realize that something more needed to
be done so that they and other Cheyennes with far less class time than they
have had would be able to locate verbs. I then illustrated why the verbs
were arranged as they are in the dictionary, to group together words (both
nouns and verbs) which have the same stem. They quickly saw from examples I
put on the board that if we listed all forms of all verbs, with all person
prefixes, all pluralization suffix combinations, all modes, etc., that they
dictionary would mushroom in size to have millions of entries.

This problem of native speakers locating entries in a dictionary for a
language which has pronominal prefixation (or even more difficult prefixal
allomorphy) is a common one, and has been discussed in the lexicographical
literature.

There are various solutions, none of which are perfect. We can enter only
complete verbs, choosing one of the persons, such as third person, to be the
default form for entering verbs. This would obscure the stem relationship
between verbs and nouns derived from them which start with the first letter
of the stem. We can have a more detailed explanation in the Introduction to
the dictionary of how the verbs are composed (we have spent a lot of time on
this in previous classes and students understand verb construction well) and
how to locate verbs by their stems. I already had the following paragraph on
the first page of the dictionary, which they were asked to read in the
homework assignment:

"This dictionary is arranged in alphabetical order according to the first
letter of the Cheyenne entry. Many entries are parts of Cheyenne words
called morphemes ("blocks") or roots. Most of these partial word entries
also include complete Cheyenne words as examples. There is also a separate
English index to the Cheyenne words in the dictionary."

Obviously, this was not complete enough to help the students. At a minimum,
there needed to be examples illustrating how to locate verbs by the first
letter of their stem.

I know that others of you have struggled with creating dictionaries which
are accessible by language speakers themselves, not just the linguistic
community.

What solutions have you found which help language speakers use their own
dictionaries fairly easily?

Thank you,
Wayne
-----
Wayne Leman
Cheyenne website: http://www.geocities.com/cheyenne_language



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