[Lexicog] part of speech in E-V

[Jan F. Ullrich]

Dear lexicographers and Toolboxers

 

I would like to ask about your opinions and experiences in marking part of
speech in English-Vernacular dictionaries.

 

In our current work on a dictionary of the Lakota language we would like to
create not only the Lakota-English section, but also English-Lakota section.
Instead of using the index export file option of Toolbox, we have created a
separate Toolbox database.

In doing so we find it difficult to deal with the part of speech field in
the E-Lakota section.

 

First of all, it is not entirely clear to me from the MDF description if the
\ps field is designed for the English lexeme, or for the vernacular (Lakota)
equivalent. 

>From the perspective of what we want from our English-Lakota dictionary, we
think that it is better to mark the part of speech of the Lakota word. 

An example:

 

black adj. sapa

(here the ps marks the English lexeme, not the Lakota equivalent which is
actually a stative verb)

 

black vs. sapa

(here the ps refers to the Lakota word)

 

an alternative would be:

black adj. sapa vs.

 

But I don't know if this is possible to do in Toolbox and not sure if it is
a desired solution because it could become very complex in entries where
both English and Lakota words are of multiple part of speech.

 

I would be interested to know how others dealt with the part of speech of
English-Vernacular dictionaries.

 

Jan

 

 

Jan Ullrich

Lakota Language Consortium

www.lakhota.org

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lexicography/attachments/20070323/1f2a8b56/attachment.htm>