[Lexicog] palm trees

[dick_watson at SIL.ORG]

Ron asked:

This is good, but I’ve got two questions. (1) Did this exercise just deal 
with the physical universe? (2) Was there any indication that the lexicon 
was not hierarchically organized? Put another way, could each category be 
subdivided into smaller and smaller categories? (I think of a hierarchy as 
being essentially two dimensional.) Or was there evidence that it was more 
like a multi-dimensional network?
Ron, Amazingly I was still able to find those pages from 1963. (1) What I 
see was primarily related to the physical universe since that was where we 
started and didn't stick with it long enough to get into the more 
abstract. However, I do see a few things like Grandfather earth and 
Grandfather sky that we would not consider physical. It's not entirely two 
dimensional since there was often a third, e.g., across from a list of 
birds you find 'feather' and 'wing', across from musical instruments you 
find the verb for playing each, across from traps you find certain 
characteristics, such as the trigger for spring it. 
We were trying to encourage emic thinking, whether hierarchical or 
multi-dimensional network, although the hierarchical was predominant. In a 
section called 'feelings', I notice 'laziness', which I would think of as 
more characteristic, but I should take note of the fact that he put it 
under feelings.
I find a letter from Dot Thomas to Sandy that has some interesting 
insights. They had started with a Mansaka Thesaurus in the Philippines: 
"We agree with you, Roget is a work of absolute genius, but not much help 
on any other language. As we worked along in the Philippines (!) we 
developed a few principles, but the most helpful one doesn't much help 
here (very few affixes in Chrau), namely, that if the title of a section 
was an affixed work, it probably wasn't an emic division. The only thing 
left is the satisfaction of knowing that words are falling pretty 
obviously into a category - that usually means something good. Too much 
cross-filing is automatically suspect. 
"As far as the list of unidenfified entries, we had a whopper of a list 
the first time, and I still remember the name of the page 23. 23 
synonymous with 'miscellaneous', but after we had gone through the 
dictionary once and got some help from a thesaurously-inclinded informant, 
we were able to reorganize fairly easily. And since the3re is no such 
thing as a nice emic alphabet for thesarouses, I think the best one can 
hope for is a minimum of reorganizing."
Although we started with 'world and sky' in order to give Cubuat free 
reign in further divisions, the result of the Thomas's experimentation 
started with the following three points:
1. Family...relationships
2. Social Interaction...sociableness, giving & receiving, verbal 
interaction
3. Mental & Psychological...desire, know, possibility, fear, happiness, 
diligence, carefulness, fierce, angry, disorderly.
A few years later, Ken Smith came up with a thesaurus outline that he 
thought was appropriate for mass produced thesauri. He mimeographed it 
with probably a couple thousand words: English - Vietnamese - ___________. 
 He also included extra blanks at the end of each section for additions 
brought to mind.  He distributed them for all who wished to fill them in. 
This was very convenient and the outline seemed appropriate enough, based 
on our experience in VN, so many of us gave them to informants to fill in 
during spare time and many were published, either in hard copy or in 
microfiche in 1975. I just looked at the Rade copy, done entirely by a 
Rade man and containing 3,100 entries.
I bring this up to emphasize the tension between a many year project of 
searching the emic minds of speakers versus a quick and practical approach 
that also provided a lot of insights.
Dick

Dick
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