[Lexicog] polysynthetic languages and dictionaries

[Wayne Leman]

I work with a language (Cheyenne) which is polysynthetic. Morphemes are
seldom more than four or five letters in length (and often fewer than four
or five), yet a single verb can be 50 letters in length. As a linguist, my
inclination is to display all the morphemes in a dictionary with sample
words containing them. But as others have noted (for instance, in the 2002
_Making Dictionaries_ collection, edited by Frawley, Hill, and Munro),
morpheme-ordered dictionaries are sometimes quite difficult for native
speakers of languages to use. And I have seen Cheyennes have difficulty
using my morpheme- and stem-based dictionary materials.

What ideas have you seen work which make dictionaries more user-friendly for
speakers of polysynthetic language?


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



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