[Lexicog] polysynthetic languages and dictionaries

[William J Poser]

Wayne,

Good points, though as for number two, pride in the language,
my experience there is they don't actually use the dictionary.
When it first comes out they flip through it, very likely,
depending on personality and politics, complain about the
writing system (a popular sport and you can't win - no choice is
correct), and then admire it on the shelf.

My reaction would be that the most important use here, for a
comprehensive dictionary, would be for the semi-speakers,
since they may encounter a word of arbitrary complexity that
they don't know and want to find out about. For checking spelling,
it seems to me that where the language has a nice phonological
writing system (as do just about all languages for which the writing
system was created recently since they haven't had time to get
messed up), once people learn the system they don't need to
check the spelling of particular words. In this case, the role
of the dictionary is not so much as a reference for the relatively
advanced person who isn't sure of the spelling of an obscure word,
but as a source of examples of correct spelling for people whose
literacy skills in the language are fairly limited. The needs
of people learning to write can therefore be met by a non-comprehensive
dictionary that contains both lots of common words, so that people
will find the things that they are trying to write initially and
can easily find examples, and examples of things that are likely
to cause difficulty (rare sounds, sounds spelled in a way that is
confusing because of differences with English or other dominant
language, phonetically subtle contrasts that some speakers are
not confident about, maybe complicated clusters). I am wondering
whether for this purpose this kind smaller dictionary may not be
better. One reason for producing such a thing separately, even if both
it and a larger dictionary would in theory serve the need,
is that such a dictionary, being smaller, could perhaps be made
pocket-sized so that people could easily carry it around.

Bill

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


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