[Lexicog] Lexique Pro dictionary components

[Bill Poser]

Here are a few suggestions for fields to include:
(a) meaning note - you may want your English gloss to be brief, e.g. so
that it can be used as a headword in a printed dictionary or so that it
will fit in a fixed position in an on-line one, or so that it can easily be
used for lookup in the English->Mojave direction. You can use the meaning
note field to expand on the meaning of the word.

(b) scientific name - for living things. Anyone doing biological work will
appreciate this. One virtue of the scientific name is that many organisms
have multiple English names and that the same name may refer to different
species in different areas, or when used by lay people and biologists.

(c) synonyms

(d) closely related words with distinct meanings (e.g. in my dictionaries
"waterfall with turbulent flow" contains a cross-reference to "waterfall
with laminar flow".)

(e) register - is the word vulgar,  no longer in use, old-fashioned,
high-falutin, slang, etc.

(f) semantic field - is the word the name of a bird, a fish, an animal, a
tool, a body part, a kinship term, something to do with religion,
education, hunting, etc. This will come in handy if you want to generate a
topical index, or if, in your electronic dictionary, you want the user who
has looked up a word to be able to explore by moving on to other words in
the same category.

(g) grammatical categories such as tense, mood, aspect, and negation -
these are useful if you are listing inflected forms separately. You can use
this information to search for examples of a particular category, e.g. all
the future negative verb forms. It also relieves you of the need to attempt
to convey in the English gloss grammatical information that doesn't have
any simple English equivalent (e.g. an imperfective/perfective distinction).

(h) grammar notes - this is a place in which you can explain what kind of
complements a verb takes and things like that.

(i) inflected forms - if you are treating inflected forms of a certain
category together, it may still be useful to record individual inflected
forms as part of the entry. For example, you might want to have fields for
the various possessed forms of nouns, or plurals, or vocatives if your
language has such things, especially when they are irregular.

(j) data sources - where does the information come from? In addition to the
names of speakers who provided the information, you may have information
that comes from other dictionaries or from texts produced by a group or of
anonymous authorship.

(k) etymology - where does the word come from?

(l) inverse header - depending on how you are doing things, it can be
useful to include in an entry the headword or headwords under which you
would want to find the entry when going from, e.g., English to Mojave.




On Sat, Apr 26, 2014 at 4:06 AM, Richard Gravina <
Richard-Sue_Gravina at sil.org> wrote:

>
>
>  Have you also looked at programs such as Fieldworks and WeSay? Lexique
> Pro is good for displaying dictionaries, but for building a dictionary
> these other programs are better.
>
> When it comes to deciding which components to include, it would be best to
> get the advice of a linguist who is familiar with your language, or other
> related languages. There may be grammatical properties that it is important
> to include, but those will be specific to the language.
>
> Best wishes,
>
> Richard
>
>  *From:* Benjamin Barrett <benjaminbarrett85 at gmail.com>
> *Sent:* Friday, April 25, 2014 9:26 PM
> *To:* lexicographylist at yahoogroups.com
> *Subject:* Re: [Lexicog] Lexique Pro dictionary components
>
>
>
> I cannot help with Lexique, but I have been working on a pilot project for
> Lushootseed using the Wiki Foundation (Wikipedia, Wiktionary, etc.)
> software, which is free, flexible and easily accessible. (Configuration is
> not easy as the instructions that are available can be difficult to
> follow.)
>
> You can see my beta project at:
>
> http://lushootseed.langrev.com/wiktionary/Main_Page
> http://lushootseed.langrev.com/wiktionary/sqig%CA%B7%C9%99c
>
> HTH
> Ben Barrett
> La Conner, WA
>
> Learn Ainu! https://sites.google.com/site/aynuitak1/videos
>
>  On Apr 25, 2014, at 7:36 AM, nataliegdiaz at gmail.com wrote:
>
>
>
> Hello.
>
> I am a new member to the group, and my Elders and I are using Lexique Pro
> to build our heritage language dictionary. I would like to get input as to
> which components of word meanings you believe are most important to include
> when building a dictionary. Right now, we have only the basics, such as the
> english gloss, the definition, part of speech, and we also have multiple
> audio and video files that allow the word to be heard in a sentence or
> within a story or song.
>
> Our dictionary is intended for our community, as a! learning tool, and as
> a tool that can help support a language curriculum in the school.
>
> But we want to make it as dynamic and helpful as possible, in addition, we
> hope that it can be helpful to any of our learners who might enter into the
> linguistic field in the future.
>
> As well, any suggestions or tips you might have for working with Lexique
> will be appreciated and helpful.
>
> 'Ahotk
> Natalie
>
>
>
>
>
>
> 
>
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