[Lexicog] Re:endangered entries for endangered languages

[Joseph T. Farquharson]

Dear Wayne:

I agree with Hayim. Given the fact that you seem to be interested in
contributing a cultural artifact to the language then you should include
everything and mark the ones you are unsure about in a special way.

One example comes from Frederic Cassidy and Robert Le Page's Dictionary of
Jamaican English (1967). They had received a significant contribution to the
dictionary through a "dialect" competition which was held in the 1940s. Even
though some of the words looked questionable to them they included
everything, as they said, in the hope that time would help to shed light on
some of them. I am glad that they took this particular approach. Because in
my work I am finding that many of these words were used or are still used by
Jamaicans, and some of them happen to be West African in origin. In
lexicographic work, I always think over-documentation is a lesser sin than
under-documentation.

Joseph

-- 
Joseph T. Farquharson
Doctoral Fellow
Department of Linguistics
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
D-04103 Leipzig
Germany

Telephone: +49 341-3550-326
E-mail: jtfarquharson at gmail.com
E-mail: farquharson at eva.mpg.de
Web-site: http://jotifa.com
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ph.D. candidate
Department of Language, Linguistics, and Philosophy
University of the West Indies
Mon campus, Kingston 7
Jamaica
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