[Lexicog] Cheyenne dictionary: the jury's verdict

[Marie-Odile Junker]

Dear Wayne,
I realize the CD is already released, but for the next edition, you might 
consider designing a search engine that would automatically recognize the 
prefixes and pull out the verb, and, in case of multiple results, offer 
options available in an interactive fashion ("were you looking for the verb 
XX  or YY, or for the noun ZZ ?")
MO

At 08:12 AM 3/23/2004 -0700, you wrote:
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
>
>
>
>
>
>Yahoo! Groups Links
>
>
>
>

Marie-Odile Junker
Associate Professor of Linguistics
French Department and Cognitive Science Program
Carleton University
Ottawa, CANADA K1S 5B6
Tel: (613) 520-2600 x 7601
e-mail:mojunker at ccs.carleton.ca
Web page: http://www.carleton.ca/~mojunker/

See the interactive East Cree language project: http://www.eastcree.org 



 
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