Samuel Johnson, in his famous Dictionary of the English Language, wrote this as the definition for lexicographer:
Lexicographer: a writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge that busies himself in tracing the original and detailing the signification of words
Now, I can understand why Johnson might have gotten tired of lexicography, seeing as it took him almost a decade to write his dictionary. But for me lexicography is turning out to be an absolute blast.
First some backstory: Yesterday I completed an article for submission to Linguistic Typology, sent it off to the editor, and breathed a huge sigh of relief. The article was a six-month endeavor, beginning during my time in Boulder for the Linguistic Institute 2011, inspired by Greville Corbett‘s course on canonical typology, and Elaine Francis‘ course on lexical categories. Six months later, you can check out the results here (comments are welcome).
While I’ve been working on all that, however, I’ve been forced to neglect my work on a dictionary of the Chitimacha language, an isolate formerly spoken in Louisiana, and now in the process of being revived by the tribe. But today I got to work the rust off those old intellectual hinges, and reopen the lexicography trunk in my brain. I dusted off my handy old Fieldworks Language Explorer software and got to work.
I had honestly forgotten how fun the process of putting together this dictionary has been. Today, for example, I found a pleasant surprise after just the second entry. Chitimacha has what I call locative possession (there might be a better term for this – can any of my linguist friends offer any insight on that one?). Here’s how it works:
Chitimacha has a copula hi-, which can be used as either a main verb or an auxiliary verb. For example:
hiki ‘I am’
hiqi ‘he is’
The language also has a locative suffix -nki, sometimes appearing as -nk, which means ‘in’ or ‘at’ the noun it attaches to, like so:
hana ‘house’
hananki ‘at the house’
When you put the copula and the locative suffix together, however, you get a neat word meaning ‘the place where someone is at’, or ‘someone’s place’, usually referring to their home:
hikink ‘to/at my place’, or ‘where I am’
hiqink ‘to/at his place’, or ‘where he is’
In addition to just being a handy construction, two things are interesting about this. First, this locative suffix attaches to both nouns and verbs, sometimes with very different results. There’s a lot of work to be done in figuring out what it is still. Second, while I’ve seen locative possession in other languages (e.g. Swahili), I’ve never seen it produced without any possessive marking. Usually locative possession is formed with a combination of a possessive morpheme and a locative affix, but here we’ve a verb meaning ‘be’ plus a locative, with no possessive morphology at all. The possessor is instead indicated by the person and number of the verb.
Needless to say, I found all this very cool, and look forward to investigating it more.
At the same time, I picked up a copy of A Handbook of Lexicography: The Theory and Practice of Dictionary-Making and started reading it. Having only read about 40 pages, it’s been tremendously useful in clarifying my thoughts about what type of dictionary(s) I want to create and the types of features they should have. Using the jargon of lexicography, here’s what I had in mind. There will be two dictionaries, one aimed primarily at second-language learners of Chitimacha within the Chitimacha Tribe, and one aimed primarily at academic linguists):
Chitimacha Pedagogical Dictionary
- Like the name says, this is a pedagogical dictionary, with the goal of abetting native speakers of English in learning Chitimacha
- Productive, as opposed to receptive. Aimed at allowing users to produce language, whether in writing or speaking. All productive dictionaries are of course receptive as well, but for the most part Chitimacha learners in school will be more concerned with producing language rather than decoding it. This productive v. receptive dichotomy has important implications for how the entries in the dictionary are structured.
- Bidirectional (Chitimacha-English as well as English-Chitimacha)
- Exhaustive, based on a corpus. In this case, the primary corpus is Morris Swadesh’s typed dictionary from 1950, though other sources might be included later.
- Primarily electronic. Even though there may be a number of print offshoots, the dictionary is designed to be used electronically, whether as a pocket electronic dictionary (e.g. an iPhone app), an online dictionary with audio, or with searchable dictionary software installed on computers (like LexiquePro).
Documentary Dictionary
- Like the name says, this is a documentary dictionary, aimed primarily at preserving certain types of information for posterity and research, rather than for daily language use and learning. This affects the types of information included (in this case, much more than in the pedagogical dictionary, such as morpheme breakdowns, frequency counts from the corpus, and lists of sources and locations of each word), and the structure of the entries.
- Bidirectional (Chitimacha-English, English-Chitimacha)
- Receptive, not productive. It’s goal is to provide users access to certain types of information regarding the entries, not to provide speaker-hearers with a method of producing language.
- Exhaustive, based on a corpus. This corpus will be significantly larger than the corpus for the pedagogical dictionary, including every documented source on the language.
- Print-based. Though it will obviously exist in a number of useful digital forms, this dictionary will be designed for print consumption.
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