[Lexicog] lexicography text

[maxwell at LDC.UPENN.EDU]

I haven't looked at a lexicography book in a long time (confession), 
but I will say that there are at least two widely dispersed audiences 
for such books: one is people who are writing unabridged dictionaries 
for their language, where that language has a long literary history.  
The other audience is people who are writing the first (or maybe 
second) dictionary ever for some minority language, and the dictionary 
is bilingual (or in some cases, polylingual).  And the language in 
question may be only recently written, so there is no large literature.

(There are of course in-between positions on this spectrum.)

While there are commonalities between the two cases--what makes a good 
example sentence, for instance--there is also a vast gap.  Issues of 
sort order, choice of citation form, even spelling conventions come up 
for minority language dictionaries, but seldom if ever arise for 
"large" languages.  Issues of dealing with large corpora, OTOH, come up 
with "large" languages, while linguists working with minority languages 
only wish they had that problem.

So if you are working with a minority language, you may find some good 
ideas in lexicography books of the superhighway type (how to write the 
OED or Webster's Unabridged), but be sure to supplement those books 
with books that talk about dirt roads.  One of my favorites in this 
latter bunch was

  Bartholomew, Doris A. and Louise C. Schoenhals. 1983.  Bilingual 
dictionaries for indigenous languages.  Mexico: Summer Institute of 
Linguistics.

This is now dated (little or no discussion of computers, for instance), 
and I believe it's out of print (but large portions were embedded into 
SIL's LinguaLinks help system).  But the discussions of how to create 
good example sentences were, as I recall, excellent, and such things 
don't go out of date.  (Now watch somebody reply to this and tell me 
that that is indeed out of date!)



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