[Lexicog] Features of a lexical entry in hard copy dictionary

[maxwell at LDC.UPENN.EDU]

Quoting ali72678 <ali72678 at yahoo.com>:
> I am working on Urdu Lexicon. If I want to see an entry like
> "dekhna"(to see)What features should a standard dictiony have?

I guess the first question to ask is who the dictionary is for: 
learners of Urdu, or learners of English, or both?  At what 
level--grade school, High School, college, tourists,...  (I'm assuming 
this is intended for people to use, not for machines--i.e. it's not for 
machine translation.)

The next question (influenced, but not determined, by the answer to the 
previous question) is how complete it's intended to be.  Is it a pocket 
dictionary, a desk dictionary, or _?  That may have more to do with how 
many entries it will have, but it also influences how complete each 
individual entry should be.

When I worked with smallish (several thousand entry) bilingual 
dictionaries intended to document a language (thus in theory intended 
for learners of that language), what I considered to be a minimal entry 
on the target language side was:
  The headword (citation form);
  Any irregular forms;
  A part of speech (for the target language word--
     people sometimes get confused and put the part     of speech of 
the glossing language word instead);
  Inflection (paradigm or declension) class where
     relevant;
  One or more senses with glosses (not definitions);
  One or more example sentences for each sense of     any word that 
wasn't a concrete noun.
On this last point, my feeling was that concrete nouns (dog, house, 
book...) don't need example sentences, but that most anything else 
does: verbs most definitely, but also some adjectives, adverbs (because 
this term usually covers a multitude of categories, i.e. it's 
ill-defined), and abstract nouns (because the argument-taking 
properties of the latter are not always obvious: "the destruction _of_ 
Carthage" but "the attack _on_ Rome"), and function words.  (The latter 
may be documented instead in a grammar, but there are usually some odd 
ones that don't fit the pattern, like "between" or "ago" in English.)

You'll notice I don't mention etymology.  I suppose for Urdu, though, 
that it might be relevant, since the usage of Urdu words is influenced, 
I am told, by whether they come from Sanskrit or Arabic (or some other 
source).  Speaking of which, you will doubtless have to make decisions 
about whether to include recent loanwords, particularly technical 
terminology taken from English (and maybe words which are more common 
in Hindi than in Urdu?).

I find a lot of good ideas on making up example sentences in 
Bartholomew and Schoenhall's older book:

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

Doubtless out of print now and hard to find, and written before 
lexicography became a computational project, but still useful.  I 
suppose there are better ones now...  And call me olde fashioned, but I 
believe example sentences should be made up, not (just) found in 
corpora (unless you have a huge corpus).

   Mike Maxwell

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