[Lexicog] variant words

[David Frank]

Bryan Allen 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.... Should we include any variants which are in common use?"

This is a literacy question, but I think it can be very much a dictionary question too. I have faced this issue in editing the St. Lucian Creole dictionary, and recently I was advising someone else on this very subject as he was working on a dictionary for another language. Anyone making a first dictionary for a language without a strong written tradition will have to decide how to deal with dialect variation.

Exactly how you handle this will depend on the constraints you have to work with in terms of orthography. I assume we are talking about an orthography that is basically phonemic, unlike English. You can either have fixed spellings or you can write based on pronunciation, but you can't very well have it both ways. There are advantages of either approach, but we won't go into that here, because that really is a literacy matter. I assume we are not talking about a syllabary or logographic writing system, nor even a morphophonemic (Chomsky's 'systematic phonemic') orthography.

Even if the orthography is phonemic, it makes a difference whether or not the rules of the orthography allow for variant spellings of the same word based on dialect variation. When there is variation, the only alternative to having variant spellings is to choose one dialect as standard and only represent that dialect in writing. So are there any constraints in that regard? I assume not, or else the question would already be answered. The only problem then would be deciding which forms to recognize as standard, and only put those into the dictionary.

Even if the rules for the orthography you are dealing with will allow for variant spellings, you still have to deal with the problem of deciding which forms are standard. There is no way to get around that if you are making the first dictionary based on that orthography, unless someone has already sorted that problem out in advance. Dictionary making seems to be unavoidably tied up in establishing standards. One of the main uses of a dictionary from the users' point of view is to check how a word is supposed to be spelled -- even if that is not one of the main purposes from the compilers' point of view. (I see that is one of the main purposes you have in compiling this dictionary.)

In making our St. Lucian Creole dictionary, we didn't have clearly defined dialects to work with, though there is variation of lexical forms. We had to have some other basis for decision making, and in our case we decided that the standard form was the most conservative form, in terms of historical development. I would hope you would be able to come up with some kind of systematic approach to deciding which forms would be treated as most standard in the dictionary. (I see you talk about the "correct" forms, so evidently you don't have a problem in deciding which forms should be treated as standard.)

So here is how I would handle this issue, given that a) the orthography is phonemic, b) your dictionary recognizes and takes into account (dialect) variation, and c) you have figured out a way to determine which of the variant forms are most standard.

1) Make full entries for the standard forms of the words. The dictionary compiler may well be the one who has to determine which forms are treated as standard.

2) For the other variant forms, make a minor entry, such that a user who finds that form in the dictionary is directed to the standard form. You could also in the main entries for those lexical items point the user to the variant forms.

Here is a formatted example from our St. Lucian Creole dictionary, though the formatting might not come through properly:


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vowé  variant of voyé.

voyé  (var: vowé, vwéyé)  V  1) to send.  Pòl voyé dé bwapen ban mwen. Paul sent me two breadfruits.  2) to throw.  Yo voyé wòch dèyè'y. They threw stones at him. (see also: fléché, jété) [< Fr. envoyer]

vwéyé  variant of voyé.

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-- David Frank
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