[Lexicog] Native speaker user-friendly dictionaries

[William J Poser]

I suggest a small correction to Wayne's point about "ownership".
It isn't so much native SPEAKERS as native COMMUNITIES that have
increased their interest in language materials. In North America,
where in most communities the speakers of the native languages
are a minority, some important issues result from the difference.
For instance, actual native speakers in my experience don't have much
use for a dictionary - they already know the language, and for the
most part, are not interested in morphological analysis or etymology
and other such things as they may not know. To the extent that they care
about what the dictionary looks like, they are primarily interested
in whether it is accurate and whether it portrays their culture
in an appropriate way.

One potentially problematic consequence of this is that in my experience
they often prefer topical organization, since this corresponds to the
way they think of their language and culture. The problem with this
is that topical organization is dreadful if you don't know the language
and need to look up an unknown word, and inefficient in most circumstances
if you want to learn the equivalent of an English (or other non-native language)
word in the native language. In other words, the very organization that
they prefer is poor for language learners. This isn't a problem if you
can print both topical and alphabetic indices, or provide both in electronic
form, but if you have to choose, it can lead to a poor choice for the
people who actually need the dictionary.

A second potentially problematic consequence is that the best speakers of
the language may be familiar with another writing system than the one
used by younger speakers and non-native speaker learners. To a linguist
it may be obvious that there can be multiple perfectly adequate writing
systems for the same language, but in my experience this is not obvious
to a lot of other people. As a result, elders often look at a dictionary
printed in a writing system other than the one they are accustomed to
and find it to be full of errors because the words are not spelled as they
think they should be.

Other potential problems stem from the attitudes of the non-speakers.
For instance, if the dictionary is put together by linguists or by
community members other than those in political power or favor, those
in power may do foolish things in order to assert their ownership and/or
authority, about which they feel insecure since they do not know the
language. These range from petty things, like only acknowledging the
contributions of speakers whom they favor, to things that actually
detract from the dictionary. I have heard of several incidents in which
a community assembled a review committee consisting of people who were
either younger speakers or non-speakers. When they encountered a word
that they did not know, they would remove it as an error, not realizing
that, or unwilling to acknowledge that, the older speakers who had provided
the information knew things that they didn't.

Generally speaking, I think that it is important in designing dictionaries
to recognize that they may have several different audiences with quite
different interests. At the very least, I would distinguish the following:

(a) fluent speakers
	By and large, they don't need the dictionary and are interested
	mostly in whether it is accurate and reflects their culture and
	worldview.
(b) language learners
	Learners want to be able to find words, in both directions, quickly.
	At least in the earlier stages, they may  not want to be bothered
	with fine points. Since they don't control the morphology, looking
	up complex words may be a problem for them.
(c) linguists
	Linguists want very detailed information but can tolerate root-based
	dictionaries and other devices that are problematic for others.
(d) community members who do not know the language and are not learning it
	For such people, the dictionary is largely a symbol. Having
	a dictionary may assuage their feelings of guilt at not knowing
	the language. It may serve as evidence that the community's language
	was a was a real, useful, language, not "just grunts" as they
	may have been told. They may not care much about exactly what is
	in the dictionary or how it is organized, but may attach great
	significance to what we regard as trivia, such as size and binding,
	and cover illustrations, or whose name goes where.
(e) non-linguist researchers
	A good dictionary can be of great value to biologists, traditional
	use researchers, anthropologists, treaty researchers and the like,
	both native and non-native. Such people are likely to be especially
	interested in things like the names of plants and animals and
	place names. They will appreciate not only having lots of such
	information, but having it as precise as possible (e.g. scientific
	names for organisms, lattitude and longitude for places) and tools
	that facilitate access, such as special indices.

Bill

Bill





--
Bill Poser, Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania
http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~wjposer/ billposer at alum.mit.edu



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