[Lexicog] Lexique Pro dictionary components

[Wayne Leman]

Please accept a word of caution from an old geezer who's been around the block many times with lexical data and different programs to manage it. Fieldworks is a great program, but it's got a big learning curve. It and some other programs designed for managing lexical data are best learned in a workshop setting or otherwise with a tutor. Let's remember the audience here: mother tongue speakers of a language and second language learners of ancestral languages. I have found that it's best to keep things as conceptually natural for such valuable language resource people who are recording their own languages.

I don't want to be cranky but Natalie asked about working with her data. She did not ask about what software programs are available to do that. Let's give her the kind of insights Bill Poser did, which can be used with any dictionary programs someone has learned to use.

I happen to be a lexicographer myself. Working with fluent speakers we have co-authored a nice dictionary with 18,000 entries of the Cheyenne language. The language community likes it and uses it. Over the 30 years of working with the database we managed it with a word processor to start with, then moved to Shoebox, and Toolbox, and now Lexique Pro. I agree with those who have mentioned the importance of including semantic domains however the database is managed. Lexique Pro handles this fine. I can also handle other lexical relationships with Lexique Pro, including singulars and plurals, diminutives and non-diminutives, homonyms, variants forms, etc. I wish I had the mental energy at my age to learn Fieldworks but I don't. I need to save my own energy and time for the data.

I suggest that the same thing is true for mother tongue speakers of languages. They have the advantage so many of us do not have, namely, insights into their own languages and a sense of what their own language community wants and needs.

Lexique Pro is a good program, especially for someone like Natalie who has spent time learning to work with the Shoebox-formatted database. (And even Lexique Pro is complicated enough that it typically requires a consultant to help set it up to work with a particular language and answer questions that come up when the focus turns to data management.) WeSay is a good program for language communities to use. And the point can come for language communities who wish and have individuals who are ready, to move to software like Fieldworks. But they will need workshop support (I understand that the University of Texas at Arlington is providing some of that support to Native Americans now) and easy-to-reach software consultants. Until then, let's keep giving the good suggestions which fit in with what the felt needs of a language community are.

I would like to see some experiments done to determine which dictionary software programs are most intuitive for mother tongue speakers around the world to use. My fear, from my own experience, is that we make programs so complicated that they become a focus of attention instead of the wonderful data and relationships among the items within the database. It seems to me that the most valuable activity a language community that wants to make a dictionary can do is one in which they quickly discover the words in their own language through semantic relationships, database development workshops of the kind that Ron Moe has conducted:

http://www-01.sil.org/sil/news/2012/rapid-word-collection.htm

I realize that Fieldworks attempts to capture the relationships discovered through semantically-based lexical discovery. But Fieldworks still is a complicated computer program, not a community activity that gathers the data. Let's keep things in their right sequence and not complicate the recording process with computer programs that can overwhelm sometimes even for those of us who have been working with geeky computer programs for many years.

Wayne 
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