[Lexicog] MDF

[Koontz John E]

On Fri, 26 Mar 2004, David Frank wrote:
> I have now had a chance to check what I remembered. The Multi-Dictionary
> Formatter (originally Maluku Dictionary Formatter) was developed by David
> Coward and Chuck Grimes in Indonesia. Coward had contributed to the
> development of Shoebox, which also came out of Indonesia. The works of Len
> Newell and Marc Jacobson in the Philippines, among other things, were used
> as resources in the development of MDF. MDF was originally released as a
> supplement to Shoebox, for formatting data in SIL standard format.

Shoebox came out of Maluku, too, didn't it?

The problem I encountered when I started looking at the original release
of MDF was that it seemed to have a particular model of what a language
looked like that didn't work very well for various American language
families.  This model was expressed in a fixed set of pre-selected
fieldnames and associations of these fieldnames.  The same might be said
of its suitability to different tasks, like comparative dictionaries as
opposed to bilingual.  I have no idea whether it has changed in the years
since then.  It may well have been.  The original Shoebox seemed to assume
that all languages could be represented in the ASCII character set (a
fairly good assumption in Austronesia), but that limitation was quickly
cleared up.

J



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/