[Lexicog] polysynthetic languages and dictionaries

[Wayne Leman]

Bill, thanks for the following info. More from me below.

> Ah, I see. Yes, if you can't spell correctly using a parser could
> be a problem. I know that there is work on using finite state machines
> for spelling correction, which might help, but I'm not familiar with it.
> I think that Mike Maxwell may know about this, but he's still out of
> town and probably not reading this list. There is an approximate
> version of grep, the Unix regular expression matching program,
> called "agrep", which let's you say "give me everything that either
> matches exactly or deviates only in N places". An MS Windows version
> is available. See: http://www.tgries.de/agrep/. It might be worth
> playing with this to see how well such methods work.
>
> I do wonder why native speakers are an important "market" for
> a dictionary of Cheyenne.

It's an excellent question, Bill, one which deserve fuller discussion here
on the list.

> In the case of Carrier, the people who would
> actually use a dictionary would be primarily language learners or
> linguists, and secondarily other people, such as biologists or
> anthropologists, who occasionally want to know what something means.
> The native speakers already know the language and so don't need the
> dictionary. I suppose that it would be useful for semi-speakers, whose
> vocabulary is limited, but still, I don't think of native speakers
> as users of the dictionaries. In the case of Cheyenne, is it that
> the native speakers use the dictionary to check their spelling?

1. Yes, checking spelling, which is also a reason why native speakers of
English use English dictionaries, right?

2. Another reason I sense is that a dictionary affirms a language. Many
speakers of Native American languages have been put down for speaking those
languages. Having a dictionary in one's language helps one feel that that
language is a real language, perhaps even of similar value/status to the
prestige language, English. ("Prestige" here gets a mixed review, since
English is held up as a status language by native speakers due to terrible
past treatment in the educational system, by the majority culture financial
and trading systems, etc., but many Cheyennes also have an inner pride in
their own language, something which they are feeling safer to express these
days in contrast to the bad times they went through several decades ago.)

3. Another reason is to learn words which are obsolescing or are now
archaic, sometimes seen in old books written by anthropologists.

I would enjoy it if others on this list added to these reasons, changing the
topic thread title if they do so.

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


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



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