[Lexicog] variant words

[Mike Maxwell]

Allens wrote:
> ... The dictionary I am working on will be heavily
> used in a literacy project. Newly literate readers will depend on the
> dictionary for knowing how to spell words. So I am wondering how to handle
> variants. These might be dialect variants. The dictionary is based on the
> central dialect of this language (Bai, spoken in south west China), but
> within that dialect there are many sub-dialects, some of which are spoken
> very close to the town the writing system is based on. Should we include any
> variants which are in common use, and would be recognised as 'the way they
> speak in such and such a village'? On the one hand I think it would be
> confusing as people would want then want to also write that way, on the
> other hand, if the variant pointed to the standard spelling, maybe people
> would learn the correct spelling through the cross reference.

Off hand, this sounds like more of a literacy question than a dictionary
question.  So you might re-phrase the question along the lines of
whether there should be a unified orthography, like English (only
hopefully better!), or multiple orthographies, one for each dialect, or
whether everyone should fend for themselves (since the Bai Noah Webster
probably hasn't been born yet).

I don't know what literacy mailing lists there might be--I just looked
at the SIL literacy website, but didn't see anything.  But since you're
an SIL member, I would start there, maybe with Notes on Literacy.
(Actually, that's no longer published--I think it got rolled in together
with most of the other "Notes on" series.  But you probably know more
about that than I do.)

At any rate, I'm sure there's a large literature on this issue, from the
literacy perspective (and probably a good deal more noise than light).
I suppose sociolinguists have weighed in on this, too, not to mention
politicians and everyone else who knows the "right way" to do an
orthography.

	Mike Maxwell
	Linguistic Data Consortium


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