[Lexicog] Digest Number 343

[Dick_Watson at GIAL.EDU]

Date: Thursday 19 May 2005
>From "Dick Watson" <dick_watson at sil.org>
Subject: database structure (was Digest Number 343)

First, to take up what I think is one of the simpler parts of the topic, I
believe we can agree that the content of the "wordform inventory" does not
go into the dictionary.  It's important for text analysis, generating
dictionary entries, and for morphological analysis.  It might even be
printed out for some purpose, but not as part of a dictionary.  (In an
isolating language it might even be identical to most dictionary entries,
but I don't think that is relevant here.)
Second, at the price of oversimplifying, I would like to propose an
approach to all of the rest of the relationships between lexemes.  Rather
than entering some words as subentries or minor entries of other words, we
should enter all of them as major entries.  If we wish to "define" some of
them as "see x", we can do that, but we have the choice of giving
definitions, parts of speech and whatever else we may see fit.  Then, just
like we have fields for a variety of lexical relations, we have fields for
base entry, subentry and minor entries, etc.  In a dictionary
presentation/ printout, we might just have all the entries without any of
the relationships, or we could choose whichever of the relationships we
wanted.  These would only be listed under the entry according to the
format chosen, but the all of the information specific to linked words
would only occur in their own main entry.  If a person wanted to
distinguish between those subentries which they would be more likely to
include under a base entry (in addition to their own main entry), their
could be provision for two classes of subentry.  Likewise with minor
entries.
As Ron stated, a field worker doesn't always know whether something will
turn out to be a minor or subentry in the long run.  But if he can enter
everything as a main entry, it's simple.  Then he can create the links
whenever he reaches that stage.
Dick
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