[Lexicog] Cheyenne dictionary and blog

[Jan F. Ullrich]

Dear Mike Cahill

 

> The other major thing I wanted to mention is the output. 

> It's possible to do a reverse gloss, an index. A lot
> of dictionaries I've seen have the format Boko-English, where as you say,
> the Boko is the head word, with explication in English. But there's also a

> "finder index", giving an English word (gloss) and then a pointer to the

> fuller Boko entry. That's what's possible in the current FieldWorks.

 

I haven't looked at FieldWorks yet but from Clair's review and your
explanation above it seems that the "finder index" isn't an improvement of
the Toolbox feature.

Clair is right that endangered languages need dictionaries that have both
sections, that is Language-English and English-Language. And the English
section should be more than just a finder index. The experience shows that
many native people who want to re-learn their ancestral language don't take
the pains in referring to the front section. Instead they simply use the
word they find in the finder index in whichever way they feel it is
appropriate (i.e. without studying the usage rules).

 

Moreover, as you know, it is very frequently the case that for a single
English word there are multiple lexemes used in the other language, often
with subtle meaning differences. In Lakota there are dozens of words for
'come', 'go', 'bring', 'take'. Listing these in a finder index just makes
the student overwhelmed and does not encourage him/her to refer to the ten
or fifteen listed lexemes in the front section where meaning and usage are
explained in detail. 

 

Most of the modern languages have student dictionaries with both sections
being full-fledged dictionaries of their own, with detailed information on
meaning and usage. This is probably more than most endangered languages can
hope for, but it would be very helpful if we could at least provide a finder
index with a comment for each word, for instance:

 

come:  -- vi. hi (to have come here), u (to be coming here), gli (to have
come back here), ku (to be coming back here); hiyu (to start coming)

          -- vcol. ahi (they all have come here), au (they all are coming
here), agli (they all have come back here), aku (they all are coming back
here); ahiyu (they all start  coming)

 

In our current work on the Lakota language dictionary we are hoping to
provide such Lakota section, which would be fuller then just a finder index.
But Toolbox does not help to automate the process (at least partly) or
provide a database structure that would support this type of output.

 

I hope this helps to clarify the needs of endangered languages. Many thanks
to SIL team for the lexicography tools.

 

 

Jan

 

Jan Ullrich

Lakota Language Consortium

www.lakhota.org <http://www.lakhota.org/> 

 

 

 

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