Book: Philippine (Yogad) (fwd)

[Yuphaphann Hoonchamlong]

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Date: Wed, 21 Jun 2000 14:09:05 -0400 (EDT)
From: Adelwisa A Weller <alagawel at umich.edu>
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Subject: Book: Philippine (Yogad) (fwd)

fyi.

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Date: Wed, 21 Jun 2000 09:10:02 -0400
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Subject: Book: Philippine (Yogad)
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Date:  Mon, 19 Jun 2000 00:54:41 +0200
From:  LINCOM.EUROPA at t-online.de (LINCOM EUROPA)
Subject:  Philippine Langs: A Dictionary of Yogad, P. W. Davis & A. Mesa

A Dictionary of Yogad
Philip W. Davis & Angel Mesa, Rice University

Yogad is a Philippine language spoken in Echague and several nearby
towns in Isabela Province, which is located in the Cagayan Valley in
central eastern Luzon. Ethnologue, citing a 1975 census, estimates the
number of speakers at 14,000. The variety of Yogad represented in the
dictionary is that of a male speaker (the second author) in his
mid-sixties, who is a native of Echague. Although Yogad is his first
language, he is also fluent in Ilokano, Tagalog, and English; and he
has some knowledge of Ibanag.

The information which the authors have chosen to include in the
dictionary and its organization are a result of the experience in
writing a grammar of Yogad (Davis, Baker, Spitz & Baek 1998) with
Angel Mesa. The user of this dictionary is referred to that work (The
Grammar of Yogad: A functional explanation), which should be used in
conjunction with the present dictionary in order to gain the best
understanding of Yogad. The grammar and dictionary offer complementary
perspectives of the language, and together they provide the most
complete view.

In the Yogad - English portion of the dictionary, each entry of an
item will ideally contain several pieces of information with respect
to how that item interacts with certain contexts. First, following its
gloss(es) and other information, the authors note how the lexical item
behaves with the determiners of the language, usually yu/nu or tu (Cf.
Davis, Baker, Spitz & Baek. 1998, Chapter 2, section 4). Here, the
authors discover whether the item will be more 'noun'-like or more
'verb'-like. Generally, Yogad lexical resources function with
indifference to the syntactic positions in which the authors expect
'nouns' and 'verbs' to appear. For example, the language may be
described as VSO, but any lexical item can fill the 'V' position and
accept the 'verbal' affixes. Conversely, any lexical item which can
appear in the 'V' position can also occur in the 'S' or 'O' position
with a determiner and appear to be a 'noun'. Rather than mark entries
as 'n' or 'v', the authors let the sense of the root in the context of
determiners provide the relevant information.

Lexical items can sometimes appear in the 'V' position without
accompanying affixes, and some must. Those possibilities are noted
next in each entry. Not all lexical items work in this way, and where
they do not, the authors mark that fact with an asterisk. Knowing the
ways in which a lexical item cannot be used is as important for
understanding the lexical resources of the language as is knowing how
they can be used. Throughout, the authors follow the practice of
including and marking unacceptable or meaningless combinations. Next,
there will appear a sequence of examples which fix the possibilities
of occurrence with the 'verbal' affixes of Yogad; and this includes
some eighteen affixal combinations. The first four (pairs of) affixes
focus on the 'S', and the remaining ones focus on the 'O'. At least
one affix (ma-) may select either the 'S' or the 'O' for focus. Again,
the reader is referred to Davis, Baker, Spitz & Baek (1998) for
detailed discussion of the meaning of these affixes.

Following the detailing of affixal combinations, examples will be
provided to illustrate the possibilities of reduplication. There are
several such patterns in Yogad. And finally, where useful, additional
examples of usage will close out an entry. At any point in an entry,
there may occur material between double quotation marks. These are
verbatim comments by the speaker, which may help elucidate the sense
of an expression and also how it differs from closely related ones.

It is obvious that each lexical entry will have numerous pieces of
information included concerning it ... that is, if the plan of the
dictionary were completed as just described. In its present state,
this information is fragmentary, and its completion will always remain
an ideal.

The intent is to create a functional description of the Yogad lexicon
as it meshes with the semantics of Yogad grammar, i.e., a 'functional
dictionary'.

The dictionary concludes with an English - Yogad section which directs
the reader to the Yogad entry in which the English expression will be
found. Because of the semantic variation of the Yogad roots in
combination with their affixes, the authors cite only the Yogad
lexical root corresponding to each English entry. The root by itself
may not have the associated meaning, which may appear only when the
root is in the appropriate grammatical context. The reader will then
have to search through the entry for that root to find exactly how
Yogad contrives to match the English.

ISBN 3 89586 585 0.
Languages of the World/Dictionaries
Ca. 400 pp. Ca. USD 80 / DM 148 / £ 50.

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