[Lexicog] Re: Using older dictionaries

[billposer at ALUM.MIT.EDU]

Michael Everson wrote:
	>> A problem with working from older dictionaries that I am surprised
	>> that no one has mentioned is that if one follows the order of entries
	>> in the older dictionary, from a topical point of view you will be
	>> skipping around all over the place (unless its a topical dictionary).

	>Aren't most dictionaries organized in alphabetical order?

	>I would have imagined that most speakers of Carrier had
	>encountered English or French dictionaries and would have
	>some sort of expectation of alphabetical order.

Most of the Carrier speakers I have worked with have had enough
formal education in English to be familiar with the notion of alphabetical
order and many of them have used alphabetically ordered dictionaries.
I have worked with some who never went to school and had limited or
no literacy skills and limited or no knowledged of English.

However, it isn't really familiarity with alphabetical order that matters.
Even if they realize that I am following something like alphabetical
order, that order is not one that they are comfortable with. In most
cases, they simply are not comfortable with metalinguistic activity other
than that associated with topics or activities. So, they are happy to
talk about, say, fishing and the vocabulary associated with it, and
to move on, to, say, trapping, but they aren't comfortable working through
a list of words in alphabetical order, or going through a long series
of optative negative verbs so that I can get the stems. One man whom
I worked with very extensively, who never went to school, eventually
caught on, in part, to what I was doing with verb paradigms, and would
often volunteer additional forms when I asked him for one. In spite of this
intellectual understanding of the activity, he continued to find it tedious
to do a lot of paradigms and I would intersperse such queries with
topical queries to clear the palate, as it were.

Bill

 


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