[Lexicog] MDF

[Ron Moe]

You are correct that MDF was less than universal. It was designed for
Austronesian languages in Indonesia and contained fields for odd things like
"3rd person dual". Those working in other language families often lacked
fields for such important data as noun class or tone pattern. The ordering
of the fields was also set in concrete. The code (Consistent Changes) was so
complicated that even the designers did not want to have to adjust it. On
the other hand it did a lot that we non-programmers could not, and it did it
very simply for the user. Those of us who used it just came up with
work-arounds to do the things it wasn't designed to do. In spite of its
drawbacks, I felt it was a good program. At least it enabled us to have a
standard for fields within Shoebox. If nothing else, that simplified our
lives immensely.

SIL is now working on a replacement for Shoebox and LinguaLinks that is
called FieldWorks. We have developed a set of program requirements that will
hopefully "do it all", including displaying the data in publication format
and printing it correctly.

Ron Moe

-----Original Message-----
From: Koontz John E [mailto:john.koontz at colorado.edu]
Sent: Friday, March 26, 2004 4:27 PM
To: lexicographylist at yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [Lexicog] MDF


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



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