Manhart editing (Lakota=>Siouan polyandry inquiry)

[Jan Ullrich]

> De mortuis non nisi bonum.  

Right! 
My comment was more about the alive who made the decision to entrust Manhardt with the second edition, especially at his advanced age.

> We shouldn't forget that Manhardt seems to have put a lot of effort into 
> that work with the meager facilities that he had, also re-editing it at an 
> advanced age; and it was, after all, the only thing around for a long time.  
> I couldn't have learnt Lakota without it.

This was not to dismiss Manhardt's contribution in making the first edition available to the public! I was mainly referring to the decision to re-publish the dictionary in the way it was done, i.e. without even the slightest attempt to make corrections based on research (with speakers or from texts). The problem of the Buechel manuscript is not that it doesn't include valuable data, but that without much research it is impossible to tell which parts of the data are reliable and which are not (e.g. entries and definitions borrowed from unreliable or non-Lakota sources, like Riggs, or sentences originating in non-idiomatic translations of liturgical texts etc.). Of course, no dictionary is perfect, but in this dictionary the problematic data constitutes a major proportion.
So, much of the learning from the dictionary inevitably involves un-learning the incorrect stuff, if one is able to figure out which parts are incorrect.

Jan