Is Shoebox4.0 good for Dakotan?

[Koontz John E]

On Tue, 31 Aug 1999, Carolyn wrote:
> After experimenting with Shoebox 2.0 parser (ITP) just to the point of
> getting it to work and building a small data base, I abandoned its use
> entirely due to too much surface variation in Osage.  I did use Shoebox
> happily for dictionary items as a simple database and found it excellent
> (except for the absence of ability to print!)

The surface variation problem Carolyn refers to for Osage was partly due
to variation in the transcriptions, preservation of phonetic detail due to
the special circumstances of Osage, and so on, and not just the usual
allomorphy of a MV Siouan language (somewhat more in Dhegiha than in
Dakotan).

Current versions of Shoebox have some simple printing facilities, I
believe, and there is now a nice separate formatting tool that takes the
Shoebox database as input and creates an RTF file plus a Word style file.
The two of these can be read into Word (for Windows) and printed.  This
approach allows you to convert your dictionary database into a printed
dictionary, for example.  I'm not sure how powerful the facilities are for
interconverting between fields and independent paragraphs or for making
various substitutions and conversions.  We've found facilities of that
nature to be important in working with the Comparative Siouan Dictionary.