Dictionaries Roundtable summary

[Catherine Rudin]

The Siouan Conference in Joplin, Missouri included a special session on making
dictionaries for Siouan languages.  This is meant as a kind of synopsis of that session
to have a record of it, as well as for people who weren't there.  My notes were somewhat
fragmentary - apologies if I've misrepresented or missed anything.

--We heard brief reports on seven dictionary projects in progress (list and quick
summaries below), organized roughly in order from least complete to most complete.

--We also noted the new dictionary of Osage by Carolyn Quintero, in press at the time of
her recent untimely death and hopefully to appear very soon; and we got to pass around
and admire a hot-off-the-presses copy of the Lakota Language Consortium's New Lakota
Dictionary.  There is a lot of recent activity in the Siouan dictionary field and
several very impressive new dictionaries underway or recently completed.

--The individual project presentations were followed by a general discussion as planned
(summary below), but we ran out of time and didn't get to the planned discussion of
technological issues.  Oh well!  

Project Reports:
1.  Omaha and Ponca
Mark Awakuni-Swetland and Catherine Rudin recently received a DEL grant to create a
dictionary based on J.O. Dorsey's Omaha/Ponca slipfiles.  Rory Larson is also involved
in the grant project.  Mark presented some background on the slip files, the plans to
create digital images from them, and conversion of the information on them into an
on-line dictionary.  There was some discussion of orthography to be used.

2.  Biloxi
David Kaufman is currently working on a revised Biloxi-English / English-Biloxi
dictionary.  He handed out sample pages of the dictionary and discussed how he is making
it more user-friendly than available materials.

3. Kaw (Kansa) and Comparative Siouan
Robert Rankin presented "Some remarks on instrumental verb lexemes in a Kansa
dictionary".  The partially unpredictable meaning of combinations of instrumental prefix
+ verb root makes it necessary (or at least preferable) for dictionaries of individual
Siouan languages to list stems rather than roots.  This point was illustrated with
examples from Bob's Kansa dictionary in progress.  On the other hand, historical
dictionaries should list reconstructed roots, not complex stems, since combinations of
prefix + root may have arisen independently in various languages.  

4.  Crow
Randy Graczyk described the Crow dictionary project which was begun by Ray Gordon in the
late '60's.  Randy has continued  to add new material from various sources, so it now
has some 5,000 Crow-to-English entries.  Randy handed out sample pages of both his
dictionary and the Dictionary of Everyday Crow, and discussed some technical issues
including the field labels used in the database, marking of verb classes, and raised
several questions about how best to proceed from here (paper vs. electronic publication;
stem vs. whole-word entries, etc.)

5. Hidatsa
John Boyle showed us the Hidatsa wordlist he has been working on.  At the moment it
consists of words with glosses, but eventually the words will be clickable links leading
to grammatical and other information.   

6.  Ioway-Otoe-Missouria
Jimm Goodtracks has been working (under auspices of a 3-year DEL grant) on an unabridged
encyclopedic Dictionary, revising and expanding his 1992 IOM Dictionary.  Jimm handed
out a page of sample entries and discussed issues of orthography, and the inclusion of
cultural material, related words, clan names, and other ways of making the dictionary
useful to the community.

7.  Hoocak
Iren Hartmann passed around sections of the recently completed dictionary of Hoocak, to
appear from SUNY press.  The dictionary is part of a Volkswagen funded Hoocak language
project.  Her handouts illustrated the database field structure used in preparing the
dictionary, Hoocak-English and English-Hoocak entries, semantic classification/thesaurus
and word frequency list.

Discussion:
General discussion focused on what information dictionaries should include.  
--Depends on users; not everyone will want all possible information.  But including more
is better than less, at least in databases (option of printing only some fields to
create dictionaries for specific purposes).  
--Training in using the dictionary may be valuable for teachers/other users.
--Format matters.  Electronic dictionaries can have more information and can always be
updated; book dictionaries are "a one shot deal" and will have issues of
space/size/printing cost.

A core set of information to be included seems to be pretty well agreed on.  All the
presenters in the first session included (or hope/plan someday to include) mos of the
same information.  We reinforced this by making a list on the board, as follows.  Some
of these are more basic and crucial than others; some generated some discussion.  But
I'm just listing them here without comment.

Entries should include:
word
homonym number
glosses
example sentences or phrases
grammatical class and/or conjugated forms
source (document or speaker; inventor if new word, indication of degree of certainty)
semantic domain
literal meaning/breakdown of compounds or other complex lexemes
idioms, compounds, collocations, or names using the word
function (e.g. imperative)
Cultural notes
other notes - usage, gender, history/etymology, variant forms (dialectal, idiolectal,
older/newer, etc.)
related words or congnates

Front matter should include:
explanation of grammatical class labels and other information in entries
explanation of orthography / pronunciation guide (and of alphabetization)
source list
some type of grammar sketch.

Pictures/illustrations are nice - we briefly discussed creating your own vs. getting
permissions, issues of memory and space, cost for publishers, etc.  

All the Siouan dictionaries are bilingual; there was some discussion of whether
monolingual dictionaries (with definitions in the native language) would be desirable or
feasible.  

There was some discussion of long-term archiving options for preserving dictionary
databases; APA and Max-Planck Institute were mentioned.

There was some discussion of orthography as a general issue (not necessarily just for
dictionaries).  

John Boyle volunteered to set up a clearinghouse web page with links to all the
dictionary sites presented at the workshop and other useful / related sites.